Horton J. Pig Dog

I never knew a dog the world conspired so much against:
the body of a hunting hound, his legs were as short as
a dachshund's, complicated by a case of rickets, leaving
his joints twisted, painful in the frost or damp. And yet,
they had once saved his life: hit by a car, he had been
short enough to shuffle under the bumper & so escaped the fate
of a larger dog. But even as a pup, in the tan, pig-looking
face captured in the photo that gave rise to his last name,
he seemed fully conscious that things would only get worse.
He was wasn't old, we had him only seven years, but the long
winters left him each year more worn out, turning grey-haired,
limping. Irritable, and now cared for by my brother,
he clawed my niece and my sister in-law had had enough.
At the vet's, walking to the pound, he turned
to my brother, knowing. Caged, Horton J. Pig Dog waited
as he always had, sitting on one buttock, a paw bent awkward,
his head erect.

Harbourfront Coureurs de Bois

The still water curls in concentric arcs
from my feathering paddle-tip, over
sun-clear, gravel-bottomed lengths.

City sounds and mallards feeding among gulls
drift through the receding swirls as I meander,
alert to wind-shift, blade and balance.




early 1980's
after paddling Omer Stringer's
12 foot birch back canoe
in the cement pond at Harbourfront,
Toronto


from Providence and the Itinerent
and Selected Works

On Our Way to Disney World

She may have been eighty-five,
black, a bandanna holding gray curls back

and a print dress faded and
contoured down grandmother curves,
eating a grape;

not as you or I would eat them,
a cluster at a sitting:

she was leaning on her porch railing,
sucking a solitary grape held in her fingertips
like an egg in an egg cup,

her eyes on us, talking about the city
needing her street, taking her house
and there being nothing she could do about it;

that one grape still in her fingertips
five minutes later when we left, glancing back.



circa early 1980's
from Providence on the Itinerant
and Selected Works

Muse-urge

It is an ocean-bottom river:

currents of feeling-thought that converge
into articulations of erosion;
an elucidation of channels and flows,
a voice that forms and folds
as it sweeps across floors of seas
to the foundations of continental shelves:

the urge becomes resonant and dissonant,
encrusted with the washed and
run-off remains of the world above,

fertilized with soils;

it is an underwater cascade off the shelf;

memory-streams that fall
into submerged crater pools
from the heights above,

and from above the continental shallows,
beyond the atmosphere of wet
in which the urge to compose arose,
fall materials from the unrolling lands
of the air, from the realms of the enfolding sky,
earth clouds washed by torrents unleashed by
thunderheads; by light rains
that drift offshore:

weighted mysteries of mud and debris
that sink in swirls and roils
of dissolution downward;

and it is then that the uttering voice becomes
as substantial as sunlight that dissipates
mists into the shifting dapples and shadows of day,
the words speak an effect into motion,
they become as substantial as moon glow radiating
from the rim of the blackening deep
as dusk darkens the ocean
in which the urge
first appeared as current
from elsewhere, from
inside, within and
without, alternating,
ongoing.