Thursday, March 22

Living here, breakfast cereal
and 1 year old spooning
apple sauce on
to the floor.

Last night’s snow melting,
a mist of rain but
clear skies over Cranbrook Hill.

Ice in my coffee so
I can drink it quicker.

Living here, not summarizing
the weather or whether
somewhere else is different.

In The New Sentence
no one reads
Prince George.

What might be valid
in the face of writing,
land, an “attack” on language
poetry and staked claims;
the line a territory.

The sun saunters the rim,
other kids wake up,
the table fills,
the bus to campus leaves in 15 minutes.

With regards to the particulars
living here is writing
with the latitude to do so.

Hwy #16

a poetics of interruption, green
signs that names exist, shifts
in zones of code, the topography a knowledge
in the syntax of rivers
that can kill you

the weather is from the north and west
a text tracking eye
but the water flows everywhere
even here

on the new highway the poet’s teacher
talks behind the poem pointing
out the old homesteads, overgrown roads

each valley is a climate
a tincture, a spool of vegetation
veering away from the asphalt, axles
refusing the traffic laws, progress
sliding in mud, a bloom of spores

travel was a finger pointed
at a spot up the valley—now
the highway goes around, longer,
inefficient; and old hazelton exists apart,
a benchmark, an anthology of poems
from the predecessors, dedications
inscribed in finding one’s way.

The Regions of Out

traces of the town unsettled
like populations of who

terrace’s mill shipped out
on flatbeds of gas and oil
and the mall fills with associations

is a name sustainable? are bar conversations
a poetics of the north?
is the way out commercial
drive and shop?

a fistfight on the shore
over access, modes of use
but none of them really work

purdy & newlove
the paths and waterways
knowing the overgrowth of living language

i travel the regions listening
for the old ways, a funky answer
to an 1890’s question

The Controlled Burn

Seeds unlocked nutrients, the stock
is sprung, ignition cracks through
clouds, unstacked the faller’s log
books fall and the biomass is maintained.
Sediment corrects itself and recalibrates
the general economy with no
road in. You see, the mercantilist narrative
can’t live here and I will never export
the poetics of land. The line is struck
a careful interaction with the history
of poetry. Where the edges are, a glimmer
of smoldering sense hushes and goes out.

Poem the Avatar

is all that we are
pushed and patrolled
Poem looks about, peers
through the petrol haze
at the library call numbers’
sequence and scratches his head

if it were a heading
the world would read: Caution
Under Construction—Check
Back in Two Weeks

Identity brushes past Poem
down the library aisle glancing
at his ineptitude, noting
his pout and defeated slouch
--a faint odour of
ginger and justice lingers
as she passes

so Poem heads for the facsimile street, walks
out looking for clues to origins and
why water is so expensive

the sidewalk or small
path through the orders of knowledge
stops

okay,
what now, Poem asks
looking up from the white edge
of invention—what now?

Free Radicals

oxygen in the air interacts
with molecules in atoms
with an odd (lonely,
unfulfilled) number of electrons

this often occurs during childhood
and it is clear that instability is a matter of
support—who is around you

highly reactive radicals create
a chain reaction, like dominoes
and then the trees fall faster
and good old houses go
and ethics leave

cells may function poorly or die if this occurs
and this general malaise is called progress

but a defense system of antioxidants
often identified by their distinctive colour textures—
the deep red of cherries and tomatoes;
the yellow of corn, mangos,
and saffron; and the blue-purple of blueberries
and a good poem—
these create resistance
to the unstable atoms
and this defense is called community

in this context, oxygen in the air interacts
freely, with a radical poetics,
and cells maintain joy sustainably

the old road

discussion was inadequate,
it didn’t move us—
that new language wasn’t there
now or then

when inscriptions sank blood
and charters bloomed in the ditch
i was there, shining,
a bobble in the wet loam

parchment bark timed by
the traces of access
and construction, less
overgrown and constant
than the land could bear

edges, boundaries sunk
in, filled in, and then recut
with the scythe of pure politics

to distinguish but not name
or the reverse—the lichen
remained an impossible
feat heightened by loss
under the recurring suggestion
that this was once something
inhumane

Poem, A Haunting

a nice trick that, there
and not but hoping for
some contact, a brush of
breath or return word
like “yes” to ease the lonely utterance,
to ease the lonely
otherness that follows us
all always giving

into sleep would be giving in to
the imagined presence of
you—clandestine and uncertain
reader, there
and not

a vague after-image
like recognition, or the shift
beneath us as something larger moves:
language, soil, the news . . .

Poem and you meet in a bar
not the usual but one at the edge
of downtown and the conversation
is about line breaks, line
breaks and repetition, line breaks
and where to pause and let the other
possibility occur, words lingering
suggestive but not fulfilled until

you break the linguistic sign into
a question of waiting or giving love

the next evening, Poem waits
in a bar, a different bar, wondering
whether to write or go home

Dear Poem Re: Resistance

So sorry but my right
turn signal seems broken I
apologize if I

‘ve cut you off Poem
you see I am trying
to decide who is status

quo and who is the resistance
with your penchant for shifting
codes and flooding the market with cheap

pharmaceuticals and me, with my
child car seat instructions and
an identity that is far from

stable. Poem, is it you who teaches
me ethics? Or is it me that
pulls you from that bright

brink of clarity?

Poem Tries to Hail a Cab

Code whizzes by and Poem is left
ineffectual at 1st and Main
centrally unheeded and unsure
of how to proceed. But he is
in no hurry and likes who
stands with him there, shivering,
bemused: Editing weighs options,
jokes about what could have been;
Font gazes the opposite direction,
admiring the way the street curves
into the industrial park and her shoe is untied;
Paper, unflappable, is telling stories about publishers and
their odd habits of self-destruction.
Laughter, warmly uncomfortable on the curb,
ebbs as the vehicle of time management
flashes by. Poem is worried the others
may catch cold, who will pay the fare,
that this is an elaborate
symbol for the state of poetry
in the world, huddled there,
waiting for something.