Works

How death will steal, from life, to claim us all,
Happy to wrap us in barbary white,
By tapping ash tight fingers, the steel laws of fate,
Will deaden our faces, wrapping our feelings from earthly sight.

The jungle where the meow goes in, is
a forest for hoodlums.
Trucking up, the empty warriors
breakfast on lost impatience,
apricot fields away.


Now see them speed away....

A rail fence is more than that on a country dawn
moving by lots over hill & stone;
it barely pauses in the small of the field's lap,
then is caught in grey positioning as
light unfurls the sky.
...

The trees
are forming hands
to cloak the sky
with pillow whispers,
until the soft equilibrium
behind laughing eyes
departs down the moon dark world.

They made us sit alphabetically in rows.
Green oranges are sprayed systematically
in volcanic soil near pummelled surf.

One stood to answer questions,
was called after the surname,...

Fall was a tubercular cousin
residing in the country
sparse hair,
rasping cough.

2
Night air was damaging
stringing pumpkins
around orange chains, the
milkweed pod shivering...

I see children rowing with crayons
across a park lagoon.

They are sagging,
they have just killed a blackbird playing:

the lot of you,
scribbling to school.

Later on, I retrieved...

The leaves lie hidden as spades about their home.
Brief movement of a kitten, then silence
till the car's engine drones.
Close by, a pioneer cemetery sits near a secondary wood.
...

The gathering of dead wood - driven,
pinched in faces between
the strain of Van Gogh's setting -
had all the more realism
hastening down that leaden street.
...

I touch your
face - where strands of whispery hair
dangle your thoughtful gaze through mine.

Clutching,
all the words not said
lie pale and broken
beneath forgery lies.

...

"We think by feeling. What else is there to know." Theodore Roethke
...

An abandoned house -
dark salved to eclectic;
crinkly, black pigment of old pine boards
disparate to the elements.

The waters of the bay lie beneath.
A long slope trailing back of brush,...

Barely annoying the woods,
his cabin like our woodpile
home now for chipmunks and birds,
isolated by the lily pads -
he eschewed all comfort.

The view barely cognizant,...

The long finger of blackness is holding its head for us.
Dingy bue is its shade,
comatose in movement, hazarding a slow swiftness,
it inches toward us.

Relief comes fitfully....

*
"...the fourth state of water in its plasmic state ...
elements as plasmic water have programmed goals which
they follow like earth encompassing genies.

In soft light
amid hues...

It was a red letter day and all within a decade, the sixties.

Psychadelic and all because the Electric Circus opened up
Walking Yonge Street in the December cold, aging...

Who administers to my needs?

Is it the dandelion, so ant-encrusted, that
yellow pollen dangles from a shiny abdomen
suggestive of some actor's
smeared and garish make-up?
...

Taken as metaphor ...
Ophelia's funeral oration,
derogatory snout
of the Morning Glory
breathing pollened fire
overladen steps of the church.

II
Limestone rock
caulking in grey...

Shopping in their heads
- a man a pair of shoes
right colour (tan, off-white) shape -
only good physiques need apply,
degree, tall;
self-confidence a "must".

Not yuppie, really,...

The "Haight," in Ashbury lived up to its name.
Sexual pioneers became commonplace.
Agribusiness consolidated the back to the land movement.
Joni Mitchell remortgaged all the tree museums....