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These poems were first published in The Tongues of Earth (Coteau Books)
Forget Me Not
Before the sea grew, the elders say,
there were villages and farms edging out from
what’s now the shore, and the seals who turn
whiskered heads in the air to watch
people on the kelp-entangled rocks can dive
among houses where the fish slip through doorways
or hide in jumbles of fallen slate.
And once, before the sea grew, a boy who lived
in such a village came running home to show
his mother a pair of eggs he found by a wall,
eggs the colour of forget-me-nots, as cool
to his touch as a shadowed stone on a hill
that welcomes, even now, the flight of larks and hawks
and sunlight unhampered by water.
“Don’t worry,” she told him, “they were never meant
to hatch.” But he cradled them, one in each hand,
up a rough path overlooking the bay
and lodged them in a swirl of hazel. That morning
the village quivered in a dry breeze
that quickened the passage of small boats and no-one,
the elders say, imagined the future.
Driving West From Milk River
Blue, a ragged stripe of blue
in the far distance and a cord of road
hauling me towards it, a tumbledown
house by a dried-up marsh, no other home,
the sun spreadeagled across the stubble,
blue teeth in the sky’s mouth, a coyote
bounding the highway, no other journey,
always blue, its gravity, its lightness, turning
slowly into mountains, thin grass disturbed
by peals of wind, a dozen black cattle
near a waterhole below a yellow slope
browsing what they can, no other life
and the blue rising closer, waiting to grasp
whatever offering I am.
Paradise
1
A bar in Amsterdam.
The forests of the flame-templed babbler, the Juan
Fernandez firecrown, the ’O’u.
When I was younger, you.
2
There was no Eden. Every hour was Eden.
But in the aftermath, a garden.
Lemon, thyme, ginger. Cedar, impatiens, bay.
A garden with walls, holding the world at bay.
3
Stories we recite to ease our pain
Trying to keep brushwood alight in the rain,
Hellfire missiles, sabre cats or AK-47s
Determining the lie of heaven.
Poetic Voices
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