Settling back into a familiar environment in Ottawa these last few months has meant, for some reason, that I have not given myself the space to sit and write. I have time. And sometimes volition. What I lack is the ability to overcome the inertia of life’s moments .
One day, I’ll sit down and try to put words to the feeling of comfort, love, freedom; and the stifling claustrophobia, the nostalgia of home. The work of putting into words what it is to be alive is less of a project and more of a process – one that I’d like to continue. Sometimes, when I realize it’s been ages since I last wrote, I revisit old writing, hoping to spark something inside me. And it often works – enough to get me writing, even if the final product isn’t worthy of anyone else’ eyes.
New and old poetry:
Two years ago, I spent 6 months in Nunavik in the small Inuit village of Kangiqsualujjuaq. It was a beautiful, tragic, joyful, inspiring, exasperating, humbling time. I wrote a lot while up there, and after a few great editing sessions with my talented and dear cousin Stephan, and a lot of time to settle, a handful of pieces are as ready as they’ll be for the eyes of others. For more on the North, read Martha Baillie’s In Search of Heinrich Schlogel. A fantastic novel and meditation on the North.
* 2018
**Nunavik (2015-16)
*
You have watched me through a crook of branches
How have you seen me, moving through the years?
parting their stocks, husking cobs with steady, wizening hands?
am I strong? Do I stand an obelisk amongst the cracking shafts
bent in fingers of October howl? have I had purpose, my teeth
in peach-soft kernels? have I been straight and sure, smiling wisely?
these years you have watched me through a crook of branches
you have thought me strong, unwavering, bristles of adventure
growing on my chin
did you see the crackling light, my knees
in a rasping desert copse? did you see drops of blood parched
and flaking on my shins?
you have made something without my bulk. covered
in the pencil sketches of a child’s dream, a rose-coloured tunnel
you have become God
but you will be nothing
at the end
Spring
the blizzard grinds into soft flesh cheeks of spring
pelt the world with frozen lattices
origami into the ruffle of feathers
unflinching on a grey and swaying branch
it has transcended old hearths and rattling doorknobs
strangled failing army officers with hemorrhoids,
oxidized throats, chafed the angry skin of brittle limbs,
torn at family fabric
an overgrown garden of tiny feathers lie
for months, til they are consumed by a lithography of soil.
you sweat into the prickly bend behind your knees which is
soaked in expectations, the warming wind, a sun that is
toxic with eyes, and pins you to the same fluttering spot
where your head spun like an owl
**
the cycle
the kid everyone knows
is the kid whose insides
decorate one smoke peeled
room, one busy
funeral parlour
with traffic to match
the birth rate
what sage prophesied
a naked man, worn-out
leather draped on bone,
with a beard–
running over bearable
embers of blue ice
to a crack where he slips
beneath the roof
to look for mussels –
would never
sit down again
he would disappear
die?
a knot is not hard to tie
a loop is not hard to tie
a noose is not hard to tie
its like this, and then this,
I tie it, you remember
(actually, everyone does)
and then you’re done
you’re under that ice
it’s like when you put your feet
into the snow, or your hands,
long enough they burn
and the burn goes away and then
you just don’t feel anything
anymore. once you’re down there
everything just turns off
even your ear drums freeze
so you can’t hear them talking
its not bliss, its just nothing
who never imagined
the ruinous contents of a bottle
half-empty, half-empty?
which mother gave her life
to a boy, her son, to eat
and walk into the warmth
of a far off winter camp
and where is she now?
where is her spirit in these
surrogate bottles?
End of a day
A stomach hollow emptied out each night
like the frozen body of a skinned fox in the snow
(soon it will be sinew and bones only)
when sun slides behind winter taiga – docile white ptarmigans
from afar, howling violent on approach – heaps
that grey and disappear behind ceaseless wind
there is not enough meat in the hollow to hang hopes
just frail sinew of that forgotten fox
twangs and resonates in the yawning glut of night
yellow globes in the river’s black bellows where
hooded children silenced by gutting wind, frozen stones
no more words
surely the little beast went blind before drifting away
it is an irreversible hollow and the night goes on
Nicholas: 2 poems
I
the birds are back
twitter in treeline brush
stunted spruce.
they are late. he has gone.
no more
steady muscles
silent in ripping wind.
his soft mouth pulled
a squinting smile.
snow melts in May; scrapes rock
clean and boggy – a cigarette butt
caught on granite fills its plastic
pores with brown, living water.
It is not Nicholas’, his hand
can hold nothing now
for the rest of time.
II
this is a poem for you
even though you can´t hear me
even though everything goes on
while you decompose
I wrote something else about
you, but it just sits
waiting for time to forget,
you´ll go too, I know
you´ve already faded
like everyone does –
give it a few years
you´ll hardly be a synapse
just flowers and permafrost
ok, I´ll probably never forget
you, and your sisters won´t
and your brothers –
My mind from a rocking chair
I rearranged the jars in the kitchen cupboard today
I moved the peanut butter into the fridge, shuffled
the dusty barley one spot to the left, put almonds above the stove
hid my guilty nutella behind something – I don’t even remember –
maybe the oats. the little vitamin jars I left right where they were
it snowed – not like the rains that come and go
old passions that turn blue and indifferent –
no, this snow was steady: hard, brash and delicate.
I sat in my rocking chair reading a story by Hugh Hood
wandering the streets of Montreal talking and laughing
with my lover between kisses as we passed
garden-rimmed brick mansions bantering and drawling
with the whiny well enunciated voice of a grainy
Jimmy Stewart, or a bespectacled newscaster talking
out of one side of his mouth, puffing into the studio’s
carpets and glass. Mr. Fenessden – was that his name?
– was remembering the drive to Williamstown
he was dying. an old bearded friend of mine in Indiana
told me the older you get the more you think about
your own death. I wondered am I old? between feeling and not,
warm yellow rays moved through leafy trees
overhanging Mr. Fenessden’s shimmering Raisin River
our lovers’ cheeks brushed to rosy by the sharpness of autumn
our eyes still warm, still brash and delicate. when I looked
up from my book, out from a petrified window
the snow continued its numbing project, powdering the icy street
with arctic air. some local Inuit boys ripped down the road on their ATVs
I finished what was left of the oily grilled peppers I had eaten for dinner
I rummaged through cupboards for sticky and sweet
managing a batch of almost healthy almost vegan energy balls
I thought of Mr. Fenessden’s dilapidated yellow house, the one
he never bought, crumbling under the weight of years
under the steeple of a scorched and sleepy town
his life whirred by me like a film real, a steady thing
like the snow – but there was time yet until the night
put darkness beneath my eyelids
so I got to shuffling around my cupboard
but I didn’t move the vitamin jars.