Maps

What was there back then?
Saw dust on a concrete floor,
Work boots in the closet,
A rope tied to a maple tree,
And a pink corner-room.

And now, what is different?
The Golden Country shivers
In the cold light of morning,
And it's always moving ahead,
Moving parts - out of reach.

The City isn't perfect,
But its concrete is honest,
It won't change at night.
Here I have a name and a place-
There is a pattern to these pictures.

On a clear day (perfectly clear)
I can see the white sunken edge
of the lake - motionless, a cosmic mirror,
Behind an entire city folding in on itself.
While the Golden Country shivers, asleep.

And I see the concrete floor too,
The pink room, the saw dust,
Blood clinging to a school-yard fence-
They're all planned somewhere,
All laid out like school clothes.

What are these shapes? Tall bodies,
White silhouettes, only air - that's everything.
All that is real are these pictures,
The saw dust, the work boots, the concrete room,
Pictures that appear to me like specters I can touch.

On The Harmonium

My canceled flesh waits,
the harmonium warms up.
A crowd of memories in the
walls wait, they are the
ghost salon.

It plays so that the sleeping
country may awaken,
and find it has missed
a whole metamorphosis,
a dead lifetime.

Shed skin, dirty clothes
wriggled up on the floor-
the harmonium warms up,
our ghosts wait to hear
a song so blue.

The empty country sleeps,
asleep through winter,
and in spring,
she gathers Demeter
to play a song

on the harmonium.

Letters From The War: One Red Evening

Our war was different. There were no trenches dug
In bloody mud, no bombs, no barbed wire.
Alone, we'd wander the dirt roads to no avail,
Driven by distant sounds and a vauge sense
That we should continue.

One red evening we marched through a wrecked village
And for the first time in so long we found something.
There was a house - A tall wooden house
Alongside the battle field. Its windows were white and wide,
And its doors were open.

We stumbled in, exhausted and drawn to the light.
Fear mounting. Breaths uneven. Human contact,
For once, possible. But we encountered nothing.
The great hall was empty, marauded by the war.
There was only silence.

Upstairs, the light that from a far seemed God like
Was now thin and dim. Everything was illusory.
We stood at the window of the tallest peak
And stared into the red glare of dusk, alone.
There was only silence.

Looking out from the highest window,
I realized the whole world was looming
in the distance somewhere, unreachable to me,
That it would always appear to be out of reach.

We left the old empty house
and continued our wandering.
On again towards the war
That no one ever found.

Little Animals

Our voices lost between the night sounds,
We were shapeless then.
The no trespassing sign
Was emboldened by the moonlight.
We raced past it, over the wooden fence,
Howling like wild dogs, like young beasts:
We were something more than human,
Something easier.

From where did we find this courage,
This force that drove us on and on?
It filled us up, stretched its warmth all through us,
It made us pioneers. Something more than human.

We were drunk on time, on our age.
We had yet to experience the despair
That wisdom offers. We were free of
The obsessive need to be responsible,
Yet to develop the endless list
Of ready made answers, for all the
Unimportant questions facing the
Modern Adult. We were, for a moment, free.

The old man cut his way through the forest toward us,
A shot gun slung over his shoulder like a dead animal.
It was loaded. The Human Element.
Upon his warning shot we scattered
Like fearful birds into thick darkness, our territory.

So-To-Speak (With Conviction)

[Something about h1n1 and all our drug-away carefreeness - stagnancy, stasis, good health in the modern age.]

Today we will spend our time
In a line that curls around a city block,
Waiting for our vaccination.

Later, when we are no longer sick,
We will watch the tickers
With grim fascination.

Then we will resign and dissolve
Into our work, into the ghost town,
The passive nation.

And I will say to no one:
Give me one safe bet
And I’ll move the whole world.

In a graffitied window I’ll find
My reflection. Driving alone i listen
For the song in silent foothills.

But with no anchor
The sea is indiscernible madness,
Black billows, sound and evil.

So I surface and resurface,
Think, rethink, edit, revise,
Move towards nothing with conviction.

So we look to our amulets for safety:
Give us one fixed point,
And we’ll leverage the whole world.

Letters III: Dear beloved,

Sorry, but I couldn't afford to be seen as such,
A naked thought, a wish spoken out loud.

I didn't want be uncovered so easily,
Like a rhetorical question, barely heard.

Not when I could have been the world outside
Revealed in the windows of a moving train,

In light and movement i might have been infinite,
Attached to memory, undistinguished, something beautiful.

I wanted to appear slow, like headlights in dense fog,
Like yellow hands reaching down an open road,

An ethereal gesture, a ghost in the distance;
Alien and familiar - a paradox.

Transfigured, I'd have been formless,
Free from this skeletal wreck

Like smoke, an arid fog hovering overhead,
Adrift in the vacant city... belonging to the wind.

I am an unanswered question,
By you I am made real,

Held tight within your memory I will be
Timeless, beautiful, free from human pain.

Only as a thought can I become shapeless,
Bound only by your imagination.

In you I am repeated, reinvented, re-imagined,
Unrestrained, undistinguished, something beautiful.

Dear Photographic Memory,

Look, a house!
By the cemetery,
A town for a ghost,
A sister and me,
Where fallen leaves
Filled the cradle,

Where I'd say speak to me,
A language on your shoulder blades.
Whisper with your hands,
New words for old demands, designs to extract,
To obtain, and then destroy;
Something heartbreakingly beautiful.

Fading from the picture
In the folded newspaper,
Is a hand on the window
And footprints in sawdust,
And the scent of cherry blossom trees,
And a cradle mounted by fallen leaves.

When long ago
This image contained
A boy sinking sideways
Into the picture frame,
With wide green eyes
And a shape so deceiving,

And from a living sky,
A sunset retreating...
This scene was marked
But inevitably became lost
Among heirlooms and keepsakes,
Buried in the ground, lost,

While rain beat on the grate,
I stumbled upon this old box,
A dusty, wounded crate,
Drawn with spider webs and tape.
A part time archeologist,
Employed by my boyish wonder,
My pay checks signed by
My pension for wistful remembering.

I sat cross legged in the crawl space,
Down with the dirt and soot,
And the crackle of the fire place.
I picked over the blue prints;
The pictures and letters,
And I traced the history of a house
Erected by a cemetery.

Where I'd say Lie with me
A little longer, till day comes,
Demands that came from abandon,
Designs that came from adolescence,
I barely understood them myself.
I preferred the gray sky to a sunny day,
But didn't know why. I would stroll
Down the halls of the house like a ghost.
Like the many ghosts in the pictures,
Like the tired, used up men who built it.

I too feel this home is a labour,
Something understood through geography,
When I run my hands along the railings,
I'm touching memories inscribed in material,
I am privy to a story told in the knots and bricks
That appear like messages in invisible ink.

What's in me I wonder?
Am I made of similar things?
I am somehow lead to believe
That such mystery is impossible now,
It is saved for old, dead things,
Preserved for that rugged, ancient world.
Yet, when I touch the fireplace,
When I walk across the wood floors
I feel a part of a timeless sadness,
A slow, turning seriousness-
This old world reserve is an imprint,
like the knots in the railing,
or the spots of paints on the golden bricks,
I am marked by these ghosts.
I have grown with their grim knowledge.