Sarah the Bookcase

Sarah the bookcase
You wanted is ready.
Remember I said
I could build.
Shorter and not
For that space,
Not the wood that
You thought.
Not anything like it.
Hold on it a masterpiece
Even this wrong
And this late.
Was the fasteners,
Always the fasteners holding
The progress.
I solved it,
I give it to you.

A Floodplain Line

I can dry.
I can shake a thing in the sun;
Something a flood's never done.
But a flood put a ring on these trees
Every one,
Every bark
Without thanks
As it dragged the banks
Down to the seas.
Left a levelling mark
From the run.
This a flood has done
Better than I
If I'd please.

Harvest Pressure

-a parable

When the chain jumps a cog
You don't wreck it
But inside the cab is a racket.
You shut down the thresher
To check it
And hope for no bent slats
Or bracket.
You'll gobble a log
Or a rabbit
But choke on a rock if you grab it.

The way to unjump it
Was strain it.
Bars out you'd pry it
And stab it
Maybe completely unchain it
Imparting all your harvest pressure.
What better way
Was there to try it?

An oldtimer sees your displeasure
Frowns at your
Heroic measure
Watches you
Wrench it and rock it
Then gently puts
A nut on the sprocket.
And without ever having
To slack it
He rolls it around to go back. It
Was oldtimer wisdom that got it
Back in treasure
For your pocket.

Now however tempted
To mock it
Ignore it or otherwise
Block it
When age gives advice
(And you know how it tries)
You listen, less likely to knock it.

Four Unhappinesses

The row that you sought to seed, unseeded,
Your thin stand of clover.
The wall that you built, blown over,
The loss of the thing that you needed.

Sting

Once you feared a sting
but now you seek it.
Sting, for attention directed
and learning on the job,
beats an ache
or a throb.
The snap and the ring
sharp and sleek. It
grabs your shoulder
gives you a shake
and goes off,
done its turn.
No getting older
with you, like a yearning.
Sneaky, the sting unexpected.
A quake when all is calm,
a dry cough.
The wrong balm
on a burn
and you're back at the burning.

The Red Moon Lesson

The red moon in the trees
Seemed strange.
Usually lunar degrees
Take a higher range,
A vibration octaves more;
A colour more of struck phosphor.
To catch this and deliver it to friends
I raised a boxed-in lens
And learned
The moon might leave trees burned,
Might not take flight,
But pictures never get it right.

When can laughter hurt?

The ravens perch on posts with beaks agape,
They cluck and gurgle as I comb the dirt.
It's laughter surely at this naked ape
Who finds their lunch, but when can laughter hurt?

My trailing harrow strafes the strawpile house,
A flash of onyx beak and underwing.
The laughter stops to lift the scatter mouse
As high its squeak will ever sing.

Correction Line

Lines are made for absolutes,
The absolutest of the shortest routes.
The here we make this mine
And then there yours calls for a line.

But here’s a hitch; we’re wearing an equator.
And when you go to write down on a table
All the boundaries you’re able
You’ll note the problems of Mercator.

You’ll struggle keeping lines within their place.
And any way you try to trace
The longitudinals, they come to meet.
So how to draw that on a sheet?

Convergence of what’s meant to stay apart;
Anathema to the cartographer’s heart.
(And now we’ve found our terra is tectonic,
So there goes any hope to stay Platonic)

Oh, we can get by these deficiencies
With just a few line-surveyor decrees:
When the line gets too off base,
Steer it with another into place.

Reminds me of a recent physics article:
Just as a line corrects a line
(Along with publishing a new roadsign)
So can a particle a particle.

Love

Love landed like a butterfly.
Lit upon my hand out of the sky
And only I thought it would stay.
But butterflies are hard to please,
They fly on just the slightest breeze.
To never leave but get away,
This is the lepidopteran charm.
So now I search the air and stand
Waiting with an outstretched arm,
And open hand.

Two Farmer Similes

Hot as a boiling over rad,
Or surface of a slip clutch pad.

Some Sharpened Luck

An antler shed
Jammed in my tread;
Some sharpened luck.
I wish that buck
Had kept instead
His pointy bits upon his head.
Tine beats rubber, that is that
And runs the rubber round to flat.
I stop despite engine insistence,
Fall to Cervidae resistance.
The weapon of the deer-buck lingers,
Hides in the straw to strike with bony fingers.

Hectoring Americans

-for Pamela Wallin

Senator, was that suggestion or an order,
“No moralizing aimed south of the border,
No fuss now when a friend acts bad
When paying; take the pay, be glad!
Best practice to befriend the global warder”?
Also, you’ve set the daily rate –
The price for us to shut up and be nice-
At ten twos times ten to the eight.
Big numbers tend to satiate.
How big (or small) then would suffice
To ethically attenuate?
Justice only if we can afford her.
I think I’ll sell mine at a different price.
Or not, since I was always taught
That rights and wrongs could not be bought;
That morally I oughtn’t be a debtor.
But here’s a thing the neighbours did do better:
(A low bar for the good, I would have thought)
But for bright lights and roving waterboarder,
But for a childhood fenced with bar and cot,
At least they’ve given Omar Khadr quarter,
Something your masters thought they’d rather not.

CEO

I needed the work so I kept my mouth shut
And I never asked why and I never asked what.

Amazing now that the years have elapsed
How certain my answers to questions unasked.

The Death Of Books

What would I slip between the edge and jamb
To keep my windy door from slam

What could I soak and spoil with sand
And still retrace a writer’s hand

With what would an ambitious crook
Deceive; what then have thieves to cook

What would we burn instead because
Of things claimed there as ‘is’ or ‘was’

Why would we always race the streets and kill
What would our propaganda fill

How would we fool the laity
Where would we foolishly hide deity

What would I slip between the edge and jamb
To keep my windy door from slam

What could I soak and spoil with sand
And still retrace a writer’s hand

The Sad Case of Our Houses Made of Cards

Compared to things stolen
A very few only are bought

By buyers who think they can do
What it is that they ought.

Prepare you to live in a house
That'll crash with a few pulls

If your deck is protected
By nothing but somebody's scruples.

Wrenches

Plenum and Vacuum
Idées fixes, they
Take unloved evidence
Throw it away -
Banished from any workbenches.

Object and Surface
Posited today
Melt as contingency
Nothing can stay
But a scale and a science that quenches.

Glimpses of Being
Swell up a panic
Unless what you’re seeing
Is not so mechanic
As to need wrenches.

Aphasia

My voice has left

It was starved

Now too silent

Are memories

Without words

Me redefined

Epilogue, November 2008

- Patere legem, quam ipse tulisti

Whoa boy,
That was quite a dustup.
Quite a spill,
Quite a, pardon,
A fuckup.

And we see you hobble and totter
Back to the ranch in the dust.
What isn’t burned is getting hotter,
Crooked or covered in rust.

Whoa boy,
That was quite a dustup.
Quite a spill,
Quite a, pardon,
A fuckup.

In water and ash, a turbidity;
Some trees only sprout with a fire.
For tinder, mix greed and stupidity,
And nothing throws sparks like a liar.

A Corner Stake

Corner stones are all the rage,
A surface into which to scratch
Reminders to a later age:
Was here...this stone...this mortar batch.
But I prefer a corner stake.

No presence of politicos,
No smooth hands holding spotless hoes,
And any speeches I might make
About this building yet to be
Will falter on the gentle shake
of leaves. So listen not to me.

By when one lays a corner stone
The final plans have all been drawn.
With corner stake I make my own
What heading will this wall be on,
What sun-rays will this window catch.

Colony Collapse

Seems the lately case of bees
Has been to throw off colonies.
Imperial Apiaries
Abandoned – called a word, collapse.
But bees have two or one synapse
On worded colonizers. These
They’ve used to return to the trees
Where they’ve decided, if you please,
They’ll just hang on to their honeys;
Those or at least their destinies.
So colonizers’ memories
Here demonstrate an awful lapse:
The wash of time, it always frees.
And bees with one or two good flaps
Stir storms to cause our own collapse.

you think we need peace

you never swim deeper than when you want to die but you never climb faster than when the fire is right behind and you never thought suffering would not make you blind but you see that real truths are the hardest to find but because it was forced and without it there would be just smiles and you're hoarse from the times that the climb took the breath the wind gave there are messes that need to be tended and walls to be mended and walls to be dragged down to see the best sides cause the nightly good news is diminished if people think corners are really true finished completing a race makes the winner the ace and the rest a forgotten explosions have happened.
you think we need peace.

On Hauling Water in Pails with no Lids

Depends on how bumpy
How long and how
Thirsty the ride,

Some will end up
In the truck,
Some will stay for the pail.

Now, will we
Or will we not
Still have inside

Enough for the fires
We chase,
And a final exhale?

Historica

Gandhi

So it will start with salt.
With a fistful of the white-rock
Crystal, crown jewel,
Gathering by sunlight heat
At a line that makes the land
And makes the sea.

When I reach it,
When I reach down
The power of Empire
Evaporates.
I’ll hold it in my hand.
We will be to them
No more.
To us again.

Kierkegaard

Today, how strange, a dead Dane turned
And put his eye tight up to mine
From what he saw he must have learned
My deepest habits’ true incline.
He picked their weakness and he churned
And churned my doubts with every line.

Norman Morrison

A Quaker.
Wanted peace.
Named in streets in Hanoi.
Cheered in streets in Hai Phong.
Burned in the street at the pentagon,
Under McNamara’s window.
His young Emily watched
Unharmed.

Bush, on the Occasion of the End of 2004

There are always two ways
A drug can make you feel.
There’s the first time,
When you don’t know
What you are getting into
Or if you should get outfrom.
It’s the drug and jitters,
That first time.
Hope full.

Then there’s the second time,
When you know what it does
And all the shock is gone
But you sicken from the thought
That you are doing this again.
You know just what’s to come.
That’s the drug
The second time
And every other one.

We earn the second time
There’s no one else here.
And this will be the same
As the last.
I’m concerned at that.
That maybe I should sober,
Take the wheel
And get me home.

Winter Haul

A frosty dark
Begins the day.

A crunchy walk
Across the yard.

Nothing moves,
Not wind or bird.

A hum comes
From a sky so starred.

Winter Birds

Winter birds in my backyard
Jump from seed to seed
To tree to seed to air.
I think it must be hard
Gathering the feed
To make a winter out there
Bearable. The suet cakes of lard
Give them what they need.
This flock must nest quite close. But where?

A film of dead dried wood and gypsum
Traps me furnished furnaced warm.
A man with no such thing
Finds that the winter nips him.
But backyard birds that flock and swarm
Even the coldest days will sing
Despite that heat has but eclipsed them.
They know a freedom to its form.
Do I? Oops, there’s a cell-phone ring.

Words

Today this thickened chickadee
Sung so clear and loud for me.
His hopping showed him in the tree.
He hopped with such an urgency
That there I stopped.
Gave him my attention quietly.

He led me on a little chase.
Plainly he had made his case;
I was to trod to every place
He showed. My foot trail interlaced
Where it had snowed,
And once more wore the winter forest flakes.

I thought: this friend must have some news
Since his, the better of our views,
Ought aerially reveal the clues
Denied to me by heavy shoes.
And I'll have spied
Just which of words divide the lies from trues.

I walked a while behind the bird,
The fresh air of the morning cured
The saddest things that knowing words
Can bring. He knew the pull of things he’d heard,
And knows to sing.
So he thinks, much like me, most words absurd.

Seasons

I take the sleep of trees in winter.
I pull it all within myself and wither
At the bark, but in the pith I gather
That which makes me wake in warmer weather.

I take the bounce of birds in summer,
To test this branch and flit to test another.
Wrapped and moved and seen all by a feather,
Singing songs to all and any comer.

This spark, what is this bit of magic
Trees and I receive when our elliptic
Has a hot streak? (hot, but always tragic;
Always to the freeze with every clock tick)

Hot resolves to cool, this much is clear.
Don’t they say it began in fireball?
And now, is that the winter’s shiver near?
Let go, you leaves and needles, let you fall.

Harvest Interruptions

Harvest Interruptions Pt. I: Inspiration

I’m always getting stuck in rhyme,
Even when I don’t have the time,
As now. The sun, its proudest shine,
Brings ripe canola I’ve called mine.
So I can’t spare this time for pause
Even for my ultimate cause
Of twisting on a rhythm’s bend,
My dearest friend. And I pretend
I’m sunk in dripping pools of rhyme;
They bog my swather, stop its claws.
Still, I’m sure my plants don’t mind.


Harvest Interruptions Pt. II: Broke-Down

I like that I know the look
Of 40 acres left
From a hill
Swathed in August green.
The prettiest hill I’ve seen.
Prettier than in a book,
Or on a screen.
But at the base,
And out of place
Is my machine
At a standstill.
This 40 left,
What to be done?
I thought this hike
Might tell.
It served me well
Cause this looks like it looks like.
The 40’s all
To cut this fall,
Out of the full half-section.
Wound it pretty close to done,
I reckon.

Harvest Interruptions Pt. III: Rain

Every season dangles by its whim
But fragilest of all is reaping time.
I’ve seeded through its spits to get it in,
I’ve danced to summer storms that black the sky.
I’ve struggled through a hip’s height worth of snow
To get to where it was I wished to go.
But in the fall, the rumour of a visit,
When you wonder: Is it not raining or is it?
Or the days-long after memory of one past,
When you notice how long fall wetness can last,
Sets the plants to drooling so the combine
Snorts and grunts to grind their bones to bits.
It likes it better (this preference isn’t mine)
When the sunny autumn days run one to next
And acre after acre is ingested
And its belly fills on grain grown ripe in sun.
When only skiffs of cloud appear and go
To act as canvas for the evening show,
When the sun throws yellow out to blue
And from that comes every shade and hue
Of purples- and of reds and oranges too.
It likes that and it purrs like it was new.
So it won’t stand for when rain falls,
Knowing as it does what dry is like.
It chokes and sputters, slows to chew and stalls.
It curses at the sky with puffs of smoke,
(Even the morning dew can make it choke).
But I can never find a disappointment
When its specks start gathering on the glass.
I think of all the thirsty prairie poplars
Or my neighbour’s cow’s brown crunchy pasture grass.
I’ve heard the reasons farmers get excited
About the prospect of a soggy spell.
They calculate projected profit losses
And say things like: This rain’s costly as hell.
But it seems the rain is rightly just the reason
(Along with sun and sweat and luck and hope)
That we have any loss to lose at all.
And just because it’s falling out of season
Can’t seem to make me hate the rain in fall.
If it’s just a teaser of a shower
We’ll plough through and make the machines whump
Around an autumn turned a western ochre.
But if it settles in to be a soaker,
We go until it gobbles in a clump.
Then puffing from the pulling of the plug,
We’ll gather around someone’s coffee jug.
And smiling we will say: Oh, this darn weather
While none of us can wait to use the chance,
We chat the ride home huddled close together,
To rinse the barley itch from neck to pants
To crawl into a dream of ripened wishes
And try to repay weeks of overtired.
The boys rush home to make their babies smile,
Daddy you’re home: I will be for a while.

Rain can build up on the edge of harvest skies
But never can a farmer hate to see it come.
He surely needs the time to rest his eyes,
Even if it stops the combine hum,
To sleep and dream again until it dries.

Building

I’m Building a fence that I want to keep straight.
I’ll need my line and my level
To set this against the impeccable gait
Of time. Pushed to drop up an entropic state.
The pusher, malign and malevol-
ent, never a-wait.
It pushes and pulls,
These angles it dulls,
Decaying from right to crude bevel.
I’d wish this: Stay plumb!
But I’m not all that dumb,
And by then, I’ll be through this one’s gate.

April/May

In and under, little ones.
In and under.
Carefully place you and wish
You all the best.
Days of sunshine,
Gentle rain,
And all the summer breezes.
This spring I’ll try
This once again
Between two winters’ freezes.
Press you in now
Tuck you under,
Cheers till later.
After summer
Then the harvest
When both we’ve changed.
When April/May seems
More months gone,
In dusty slanted autumn light
Then I’ll return to see you leave,
Hold you once to sift between
My palms and wish you well,
A thanks, and off.

The Warship and the Snowbird

Once there was a War Ship
Long ago in Ancient Greece
Ruler of azure Aegean waves
Men can have the shores and peace,
But it would take the seas as slaves.
There it ever undefeated floats
Strapped up to the harbour
Bobbing only ever up and down.
The Ship bides its time
Bowing to be admired
Mopped like a museum
Stale and stepped on
Slapped by the sea it beat
And always only up and down,
Retired and lashed to one place,
Sometimes it wishes to drown.
To end this wishing for the race
That with its mossy wood
Once sure to win now never could.

Once there was a Snowbird
Who exploded over Moose Jaw
And the country could not cushion
Him with either gasps or tears.
He left a life’s worth full of years,
That guy. They say he wanted
Only ever to be flying in formation,
Loved the wind so much
The ride was worth the riding’s end.
Then at his every apogee
A puff of errant breath to send
Him on his way mid wink
Mid glory mid stride and smile.
He tasted from the top a while.
But never knew the cruelness
That is time. Only the climb.
The sadness in this isn’t his.
It flows from those behind.

Causes

Cows make paths.
People make cows.
People make paths.
Paths make people.

Why it’s Important not to Daydream on a Country Road

While thinking on a riddle,
(I call them that because
It’s not what was not or was
But what maybe,
Or but what may maybe be,
And riddles are the same it seems to me)
I turned and drove down the wrong road
And laughed aloud at me.

Reclaim

It must look silly from the sky,
The farms that fit like children’s blocks.
Lonely strips of trees that line
The bits of earth we think we buy
Serve perches for buteo hawks,
Describe my neighbour’s field and mine.
For years I went to seed these fields
And tried to take from all the edge
A little more field from the trees,
Thinking of one thing – my yields.
Soon the trees were just a hedge,
The standing forest buckled to its knees.
Those silly younger years I spent
Ripping the iron into roots
To change the grass from wild to tame,
To sow the seed of this lament.
Look, now the tender aspen shoots
Attempt their former glory to reclaim.

The Cause of and Solution to the World’s Problems

I have a boot that squeaks,
It has for weeks.
And everywhere I walk
It squeaks and squeaks.
I’ve tried to guise my gait
To make its talk
Take a different trait,
Maybe a squawk.
But survey what’s around,
Just take a peek,
The instances abound
Of things that squeak.
Most in fact are men,
A lying lot,
Squeaking from above
A Windsor knot,
Showing once again
How good they're not.
Whether he be a dove
Or be a hawk,
The next leader to speak
I’ll throw a rock,
And try to change his squeak
Into a squawk.

A Walk Forestalled

Oh, you barbed wire
Hurry and rust.
Hold in your cow
Or kid now if you must,
But before I am dead,
To my blackest of dust,
Please will you expire?
Yes? Slowly combust;
Yours more to the red
In the spectrums of dust.
So what's this wish for:
Well, a wanderer’s need
Is not road-like; more
Like a grass prairie fire,
Wind-set in destination.
We neither pay heed
To silly strung wire
Pre- or post-oxidation.

Distraction

The spring sun thaws December snow,
Brings on the bin-yard mud. It plugs
My old truck’s nub-worn tire lugs.
The moment comes when we both know
That though it tries, it will not go.

I’m happy for the sunny day
Which carries on the warm breeze hope.
This year I’ll surely shape the slope
Of all my bin-yards so next May
I’ll need not curse a wasted day.