Category: Poetry

She looks at me from behind the counter.
Italian, eh?
Do you go to Church?
I confess that I don’t go
as often as I should.
Italian boy like you should go to church.
What does your mother say about this?
I tell her my mother is English.
Sure, England everybody goes to church.
Good Catholic country.
Married?
What about your wife?
What does she say?
My wife is Laotian.
Pah?
From Laos. You know, between Vietnam and Thailand.
Oh.
I mean, she is Canadian, born here.
But her family is from Laos.
They’re Taoist, but their sponsors
over here were Baptist. So now
they’re a kind of mix of
Taoist and Baptist.

She regards me for a moment,
looks down at my invoice, draws a small line
across an unused portion, then looks me
straight in the eye and asks:

You want taxes, or no?

 

The silence of millennia, the shadow
of a wall, its stones seamed with blood
cocooned with bones and burnt stars
caught the silhouettes of the watchtowers.

So much happens.

A hairline fracture from orbit; a hooked
nail scratching at the cellar door; so deep
the shade of its sentry houses, you drink
as if even water is a secret.

 

As appeared Prairie Journal, No. 53, Calgary, AB

We need three mangrove trees,
a bamboo hut,
and a shoreline.

We need a little supply boat
to putter into our bay
of half dreams
every other day.

We need one bald gentleman
with skin like an oiled glove,
one old lady
in a thong,
and one Frenchman
with a young local
companion.

We need the ginger parts
of our bodies
to remain untouched
by the sun, and for the moon
to wash under our huts at night.

We need to go without running water,
to nap anytime we want,
and to bathe in the sea.

We need
to miss things, occasionally
to be the spoiled princess,
the boyish villain.

We need to know
but for our money,
we are hated here
and love
every minute
of our stay.

 

 

As appeared in Catching Dawn’s Breath, 2008 (Lyricalmyrical Press).

When the ten-pound
Balinese
Forest
Monkey
bit my arm
I felt nothing, at first
I had no point of reference
there had been no attack
like this before:
no dog
disturbed from a nap
no angry beaver
whose dam I would tear apart
every summer weekend
to clear the river
east of Orillia; we had
a donkey
once, on a farm
lost to the ’91 recession
she was a spiteful thing
-the donkey, that is-
and she would try to crush us
against fence posts
with the weight of her body,
bit even she refrained from using her teeth
and simply kicked my sister, once; the goose
that bit my cheek
and the rooster that picked
at my ankles do not count
because they don’t have teeth
and that wild mink
was just too slow;
as for my mother
yes, she bit me once
after I had bit my cousin
and I think my sister;
she wanted to show me
what it was like
so she, like this Balinese Forest Monkey
sank her teeth into my arm, but then
what kind of person
would use their own mother
as a comparison
to an attack of a primate, wacked
on tourist bananas?

Sadly
I had neither the fix
it desperately needed
nor anything to compare
the attack to, the only thing
it produced in me
-the attack, that is –
was a stunned look on my face
and a tingling sensation
in my arm
after it let me go.

We had a moment then
the monkey and I
a pause between worlds, planets
brushing orbits, as we looked
at one another and experienced
what experts
in the animal world
refer to as “making contact.”

And so when the ten-pound
Balinese
Forest
Monkey
bit my arm a second time
there was no mistaking it
what all the mouths of my life
had failed to convey:

This is what it means
to be ravaged.