After the Deluge I Sing

As the heat deepens and the dews and mists
of the cool of the night are
vapourized into humidity
they mix - during the long simmer of the day
with emission particles and with dust
- to create a roux that
thickens the air into a toxic stew
stirred by breezes
and the brewing of thunderstorms.

The sky cracks and fragments
in cacophony and torrential pour
as red-eyed lightning rampages
and the Earth rebels against the outrages
of distempered time.

Only in the de-ionized aftermath
of the tempest does nature
reduce misbegotten man and
his defilements:
air-molecule vitalities
regenerate us
cell by cell;
the possibilities
of living well
on a planet no longer
holding its breath
allow each
inhalation and exhalation
to bring wonder into being.

Reminders of nuance
become as immediate as
fragrances sensed,
ways forward revealing
themselves
in counterpoint.

Not Dead Yet

Mortality lingers in the accumulating aches
of week long labour,
the left shoulder stiffens and the knees
accommodate begrudgingly,
and the sun baked pate slips out of time
into a two lane stupour that
allows comings and goings as the mind shifts gears
with the sudden memory
of water and blood sugar and rejuvenation.

And I know full well that I am a relatively easy-paced self
free from Third World
wage slavery and earlier era employer indifference,
allowed to care whether
I live or die on any given day, but I'm there anyway,
on the continuum of
fardel-bearing sweating and grunting under a weary life
enlivened by the joys
of being, the pleasure of the plate and the singing cells
of caress and kiss and
linger and the wiser growing realizations that impetuosity's
consequences can be
tamed or left wild, like an English Garden, an Eden of knowing
and wonder run riot,
stilled by reflection and the body's strength remaining,
the proof in the aches,
a measurement of existence stretched to the limits
then breezed cool
in the heat of a hard day:
the utter gladness of rest and the sensation
of vigour's return.

Heresy's Wordsmiths

In the heresies of daily reflections recorded
the word turns to note the way the mind
dissociates from custom, and plays infidel
while casting bread upon waters,
the quick tongue and the casual glance
and the falling light
of the skin sweet breath held in camera sight
beckon, like temptation understood,

for all paths are as narrow as the foot takes
to cross and uncross the sacred and the profane,
the desire and the yearning pale before the contention
of the final lust, piety insistent, denied,
refuted, held off, while the possibility of sense,
hair and voice and taste and smell and feeling
conspire to stray the line where gray shadow
merges with dark urge and cannot comprehend
the way the light slips cracks to find
the soul untangling from spirit
like bodies caught undressing
in a half open door by
a lover betrayed,
forgiving,
knowing too much
to do anything else
but remain the truth
when the words cannot even begin
to say what became of the life
we meant to live before we turned away.

In the blood and the loins and the lips
and the fire in the belly and
in the flash of freed thought,
new felt certainties
and perplexed nuances conceive
the heresy of experience
while debating innocence
with the willing and
the unwilling alike.

Drowned Worms

Like dropped noodles the drowned worms
lie elongated, dying on the tar
of the Mariner's Cove mini-golf parking lot.
The still-living undulate in search of soil
nowhere within reach, the night's rain floods
having carried them yards away from the land
from whence they came.
By day's end they will be scavenged by gulls and
crackles and crows. The endless tunneling and
displacing of earth through the tubes
of their bodies is over. The asphalt is ungiving,
indifferent to their last burrowing instincts.

And even if they could get
to the mini-putt course,
the holes are plastic lined,
impenetrable, and the synthetic sod
is glued to the concrete fairways.

Dinosaur Prints

Twenty tonnes of Barrie cubestone,
limestone blocks for wall building,
for retaining the hillside above a pond,
dumped on the drive,
several hundred pounds or so each
carted across the lawn on a two wheeled
tree carrier after our smaller ones blew their
tires off their axles on their way
down the grass grade to the swath cut from
the slope, hand mauled and grappled and iron
bar jimmied and wrangled into place,
three of us, for two days in the sun and
the growing black fly clouds that traveled
with each of us like the particulates
of our brain fields until the breeze
wrested them free.

In the footprint of the landscaped
property the aggregate impact
of the collected materials nags at me:
the stone, the gravel, the screenings,
the soil, the sod, all carted in
from elsewhere, all once part of the land, now
deconstructed escarpments, fields denuded
of soil, moraines extracted for gravel:
the full list trucked and delivered by
dinosaur technology and fossil fuels,
tiny brained, great big footed prints
creating order, defining a few hundred
feet of impression, reconfiguring a yard to
make statements amidst the banalities of suburbia
or the more pleasant pastorals of the monied classes.

And for me, the making of a living by
the crafts of re-arranging
disarticulated Earth,
re-articulating fragments of ancient beauty
for an hourly wage
and growing doubts.

The Leap

My room is now half-empty,
my books are boxed in the basement,
my desk has been dismantled
to get it down the final flight,
my borrowed typewriter has been returned.
There are spider webs in the corners,
blue-gray bug bodies in my window sills.
All the artifacts of my three and a half years
have been divided - some
thrown out - the rest downstairs;
I'm dislocating myself.

It's not just another move;
not just a change of address,
I'm not even sure where I'm going.

Her letters lie on my side table,
the last one two weeks old,
the last call six weeks earlier,
my last plan the one I'm following.