Wave Poem

 

The channel sky broken into long, rolling waves of white-capping peaks collapse into troughs of ever more facets of sky and sun; fold inward as liquid dimples of blue reflecting scud clouds glare light over erosion-resistant rocks streaming sub-surfaces of the shoreline through tumbling moult, a fluid, green shade of countless effervescences erupting as spray back onto the land, slipping out to collect the next row of incoming tumble, spattered gray rocks darkening with drying splash in the autumn rays of this endless cessation while the call of gulls and the murmurs of humans over coffee discussing cultural economics in the seats of the Juniper Cafe accompany the distant ferry as it stretches time towards Wolfe Island and back while I sip my own cup, staining this page with the ink of my own momentum observed.

Prologue from the Pandemic 1. It Began To Go Wrong

It began to go wrong when doubts were nursed into distrust

in all streams of information flow, media, fake facts,

spin out of control, whirling

the corruption of politics business of greed

decimating public good with ammoral sledges.

It began with local news destroyed by conglomerate agendas

of laissez-faire powers to distort truth, bury facts,

murder journalists, all of it financed by

a coin in the money laundry,

when the losers of the second world war

won the peace in 1984’s electioneering coup:

anyone with a working sense of distrust

doubts every word that spreads from the mouths of most powers.

In that spirit, the appearance of a new virus on a planet battered

by pillaging and indifference to the largest and smallest forms of life, ensured the news of a rapidly spreading disease was met with theories

of conspiracies unfolded by the world’s various, competing,

military-industrial complexes and their Officed servants and financiers: by a planetary coup of gangster capitalists,

by a China run by billionaires pretending to be communists; 

by an America run by billionaires pretending to believe in democracy through their Grifter King

who’s con agenda at odds with the personal health

of everyone on the planet, skews news to lie and facts

with no trace of common human or planetary good defenders in their circle

of bots and shills and gospel spoilers alert to opportunities to distort

truth across a wide array of bought and paid for sources,

which is how the emerging pandemic

made us all victims of our own false doubts fed to us

from fake news broadcast from all sides, street level

competing opportunisms, from those with criminal intent,

insisting on the return to work of the already abused and devalued, essential workers, who have forever

proved that they, not capital, are the means of production

the front line between humane humanity and capitalists.

The succubi rich continue to feed off the host

from the safety of their places in the shadows

while the virus unleashes unexpected depths of community

where ever it spreads, turning provincial privateers into agents of common good

 washing clean the contempt of old ways on TV, or not, we'll see.

Emergency Room Visit

A new layer of pandemic precaution greets me inside the sliding doors of the Fergus hospital. 

I have come because my right hand is inflamed with infection, leaving it hypersensitive from old, 

caustic, masonry burns compromised by cellular memories reacting to dust allergies disturbed during our slow, 

week by week move by car from our Elora apartment to our Owen Sound flat, my hands compromised

 by my initial over-zealous application of disinfectant in both homes

have left me now displaying the red, raw skin of my right hand to Health Alliance nurses 

probing my reasons for entering the hospital.

After freshly sanitizing as per their instructions, they wince in empathy as my stinging wounds 

are offered to them; the lava-like reds of flesh and dissolving skin-rock islands of molten mess 

vouchsafe my presence, but I also promise them that I have not traveled abroad or 

knowingly embraced anyone recently returned from elsewhere;

I admit my nose is runny but only when going out into the cold 

as I just did from my car to them and I have no fever, or dry cough,

what I have are burning hands now yellow with pus from the workings 

of a previously applied off-the-shelf anti-bacterial cream responding too slowly

 to stop the catastrophic spread to every nerve in my body so the guardian nurses 

allow me down the hall to Emergency, adorned in my new, accordion-fold mask, 

which I wear like an entry prize.

I expect to find the room full, but it’s almost empty, too many patients 

staying away from hospital hallways as vectors of death, but

I know from the radio that emergency rooms are among the safest places to be, 

nonetheless, none of the usual suspects are here: no cuts, bruises, breaks, gashes, 

slashed bits or internal ruptures have come; they must exist still in equal numbers, 

since they’re always here, but I take one of the many empty seats, as always by a window, 

half of all the seats in the room taped-off as not-to-be-sat-in; a social distancing measure

 against happenstance and misadventure, while an older man, stickered-defined as a Visitor, 

 gingerly pumps his own wrapped hand, gazing out the window into internal, displacing realities.

I am quickly registered and not long after taken by a nurse to inner sanctums of triage care, 

where I find myself once more trying to articulate who I am from the self-isolated depths 

of my own befuddled solitude, until I am diagnosed, outfitted with a prescription and 

sent on my way all the while aware that my last visit here was last summer after

I found blood in my urine while returning home from 

my mother’s last cancer treatment in Barrie.

The all-clears for both my mum and me were given separately last year, 

 but two and a half months ago, three weeks after her late-January birthday, 

her 88^th, she died of a recurrence that swept like a crawl understood only afterwards as quick 

back when Covid was still no more than news of Canadians trapped on a cruise ship 

just as the World Health Organization was declaring a pandemic.

In the aftermath of her death, international economies collapsed onto essential workers 

routinely under-valued though not in her eyes or mine; events now flow in dazed weeks                                           

while hopes for salvaging the living Earth through humane intercessions keep

hoving into and out of sight, nation after nation’s bipolar best and worst gathering momentum 

and she not here to cheer or decry any of it with me

in the days before my first Mother’s Day without her.

I leave the Fergus hospital distracted from the crawl of my subcutaneous itch by 

thoughts of mum gone, not there to phone while the next patient registering is an older woman, 

calling out questions to her daughter as my sister once answered our mother, 

knowing I will never know their outcome.

Human frailty shares itself: alienates complacency; existential kindness 

is offered and taken in glances, strangers greet in passing, often aware 

that our common causes are now redefining the possible, to the point 

that we can even imagine how the natural world might one day recover from us.

I Herded by the Virus LIne

Psalmists and prophets celebrate in verse;

use all mediums to assume a shepherd's voice.

Protective, warning, directive,

we stand and deliver where we are.

Poet's remove narratives, images, thoughts, and feelings

from people's hearts and minds and breath, 

transfuse us all with new ones by turning a phrase.

A dialogue of love in an age of pandemic and climate change 

broadcasts itself

throughout all isolated dominions of light; 

deep into the rockier ranges of lockdown fevers

where darkness swallows us alone, 

and where routine 

strains all relationships inside four walls multiplied 

by however many rooms we have, 

dividing us by rooms we have not,

penned as we already are with or without wine,  

or more than another for company,

food already at hand, or not,

eating together shareable in virtual communion,

help needs discovered and dealt with by performatives.

For poets to silence, 

the page is left with only what's been written,

living voice reduced to what's been said.

Not using all mediums to say what needs to be said now

leaves time unsung for others to have noted, or heeded.

The reverberations of words are resonance chambers for emanating hope and defiance.

Without access to this now's living Wurd; 

without some medium of exchange from voice to ear,

from pen to page, from type to print, 

or from ions received by our electronics across interwebs,

we cannot entrain our words to hear and eyes to see or

wills to find common livable futures.

Our ability to endure together the particular adversities that we

are each dealing with alone in all our nuanced and myriad ways, is what

ensures we can continue to develop the collective patterns of utterance and reception 

in which we will otherwise be lost to one another.

To Susan on the West Coast

Raped at gun point by a marine on leave, a rope around your neck,
led into a field, and let go... it was me you trusted...
as dysfunctional as I was, you came to see me in New Orleans
before we camped on Pensacola Beach out of season,
then went to Disney World and Daytona
and on to The Grand Ole Opry during your nation's 200th year.
I have no idea why me, why you thought I could help,
but you did, you who taught me to paddle, and got thrown out of camp
for sleeping with me on Treasure Island the summer after our travels,
before you moved out west, before you started over,
when you needed me most, even if I am writing about it now,
even as I also wrote about it in the sections of my novel that you
approved, sent me online to find the trial information to use, but there
is still some of us unsaid, between the prose descriptions of spring
fragrances, scents that words can never bring to mind the way a single
magnolia or azalea can do on a spring day, the way that forty years of
wilderness can be crossed in a wafting breeze, carrying with it the key
of how little I did for you back then, beyond finding you
a safe place to be in New Orleans, the Mississippi
rolling all your sorrows to the delta of your dreams
while I held your hand and took you for cafe au lait and beignets,
walked us home through the Garden District under live oak
draped with Spanish moss while you healed yourself
because the only gift I ever had was hope.

The First Warm Day of Spring

Wet as it was
from the afternoon rains
the soft light of moonset,
lustrous through shadows
enveloped the evening
we savoured in whispers.

Elora Borealis

1. Interlude of Quiet

The cool air of the floor of the gorge rises from the river

to the warm heights of the plateau in the light, rain-damp afternoon,

the early spring sun lost behind cloud for days, disturbing only

the equilibrium of mist drifting through the railing balusters

of the David Street Bridge to swirl the span, caress the trees

rooted to limestone cliff edges before the updraft

dissipates the remaining haze into the gray skies

above and beyond the view from our kitchen window.

There is a tenderness in the mist, an uplift to yet another

gloomy April forecast, to the chill that refuses to surrender the season

of harsh winter, otherwise gone but for warmth delayed.

Even now, the cold-battered willows,

maples and ash, seem to heal in the soft, stray breezes,

the scars of the December ice-storm still everywhere to be seen:

lost limbs, branches; split trunks and denuded boles

seem glad of the palliative day and the care of restorative drizzle.

The human animal carries the idea of spring postponed in our bones, 
while the trees linger at their own pace, nurtured by soil and water

and the many lives in their roots

while they await the sun of their quickening.

I wait with them, glad of nuanced mercies, at peace,

because they have so far survived the changing climate,

as have I, whether doomed or not, the outcome in the balance,

trouble enough for another day, for another interlude of quiet.

When humanity comes of age

Hunkering down before the golden hour ends as they say on radiowaves Canada: the need for the young and all to stay home, for the young to keep their grandparent's safe before shelter-where-you-are is declared after the golden hour ends. More will live the more the young and all stay home sooner.

Survive together no virus in the home, memories to celebrate when pandemic death passes and the peoples of this land see how many of us survived; see how golden we were in the Games of Pandemic.

I am optimistic Canada, my love for our old Dominion, my growing distrust of Canadian values now at the crossroads, our place in all this, with our wobbly charter of rights and freedoms facing the fact that the Earth itself just changed itself in our faces; got our attention because we and especially the young and their young have worked to do when this passes, when all is just beginning to be said and done anew, they will emerge to create what is coming, chains of events will break effervescent on beachheads as common sense and best practices, carve a new epoch on the lathe of earth's turnings,shaping the epoch of humanity's coming of age as a mutually beneficial lifeform and giving it to the Earth as a token of finally understanding.

You who work the tills and stock the shelves

You who work the tills and stock the shelves in streams and waves of grocery shopping crowds,
you who show up each day of longer weeks,, you who
work a viral wrench in the guts of the tectonic shifts now playing out on planetary scales:
you who live all this for minimum wage
do so in the company of nurses and orderlies, 

you have become first responders to the homelife realities of those
in need of certainties beyond yours to place in our palms like change

To you, who bag the comfort of common togetherness food
to you who did not sign up for this when you took the job,
to you who play hero to the anxious crowd on your modest stages:

to you I say we appreciate the ordinary efficiencies
of your one customer at a time service
your small mercies to us in our turn.

We convey ourselves into and out of your lives, we pass you in aisles breaking down boxes,                     
we recognize some of you from times before. We leave you to the uneasy crowd. 

So to stockers who keep stocking, and to you whose tills ring on; time blends
a balm placed in passing for our open wound being nursed
all the long shifts of your working.

For now, let those who shop agree to stay away until near normal need returns us
to you workplaces, until then, we will isolate ourselves with your daily courage,
and say that we will back your wage demands when new normal comes.