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February 13, 2014

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So as to capture the taste of everyday life

my dad would turn on the video camera,

point it at us, and let it run. If we knew

he was filming us, we only wanted to see

our own faces on the screen, the digital

moving image more impressive than what

we saw with our own eyes. A mirror

with a memory.

What curious, greedy things we were.

And now, old enough for our own video cameras,

if we wanted, we still watch our lives play back to us,

still laugh as my brother takes his tumble

into the inflatable pool. We watch

again, and again, as someone always touches

the irresistible flickering tip

of a birthday candle.

The Life Principle, More or Less (Response Poem)

February 2, 2014

February, by Margaret Atwood

Winter. Time to eat fat

and watch hockey. In the pewter mornings, the cat,  

a black fur sausage with yellow

Houdini eyes, jumps up on the bed and tries  

to get onto my head. It’s his

way of telling whether or not I’m dead.

If I’m not, he wants to be scratched; if I am  

he’ll think of something. He settles

on my chest, breathing his breath

of burped-up meat and musty sofas,

purring like a washboard. Some other tomcat,  

not yet a capon, has been spraying our front door,  

declaring war. It’s all about sex and territory,  

which are what will finish us off

in the long run. Some cat owners around here  

should snip a few testicles. If we wise  

hominids were sensible, we’d do that too,  

or eat our young, like sharks.

But it’s love that does us in. Over and over  

again, He shoots, he scores! and famine

crouches in the bedsheets, ambushing the pulsing  

eiderdown, and the windchill factor hits  

thirty below, and pollution pours

out of our chimneys to keep us warm.

February, month of despair,

with a skewered heart in the centre.

I think dire thoughts, and lust for French fries  

with a splash of vinegar.

Cat, enough of your greedy whining

and your small pink bumhole.

Off my face! You’re the life principle,

more or less, so get going

on a little optimism around here.

Get rid of death. Celebrate increase. Make it be spring.

The Life Principle, More or Less

Lazy morning. Clouded

sky. For now the cold outside is kept at bay

by the fat, seeping furnace. I wake,

I stretch, I creep upstairs, lightly

taking my place on the empty side of your bed.

You are still breathing. I don’t know how

you do it – it could be a week, a year,

a century, and you would read the same books,

leave the same dishes for washing

tomorrow. I settle

on your chest and I feel the weight

of your own body

crushing you,

the knowledge

that this is all there is, isn’t it,

licking the salt of old French fries

off your fingers, wishing and dreading

someone would come to share them with you. But I

have known this longer than you, so when

you push me off, I slink away in my dark fur

to stalk Winter itself, follow the pink and anguished

yowling of females in heat into the alleyway

to rut in the streets. I scratch

those who scratch me. I hide and wait

and pounce and tease before snapping

the small bones of a neck. For you

I drag back these little dead things, these

trophies of ferocity and survival,

not out of gratitude, or pride, but only in the hope
of teaching you what all cats know

and what you will not learn:

that the hunger doesn’t go away

even after you’ve been fed.

Garland Girl

June 7, 2012

published in on the cusp's magazine "cycle" Summer 2012

Garland Girl

My sister, she sits on her summer swing, dressed in red,

the wind making her skirts billow, and all the cotton

seeds drift and scatter.  it seems like something more

should be happening, as she clutches a handful

of faded white daisies, flowers from her youth.

she stares off at the coming autumn, as I stare at this photograph

of her.  Years ago, she used to photograph

everything, especially the valerians in their dying reds,

the ancient daisies as they lost what youth

they had.  She’d sit by the foot of the poplars in a cotton

dress, watching summer disappear just like the handful

of dusty petals she held.  She would say, no more

are the days of sun and daisies.  And no more

were her days of sundresses and songs.  The photographs

she’d taken she burned until all that remained was a handful

of ashes and aged coals, the embers left burning red

only in her eyes as she watched the snow come down like cotton

quilts over the earth, like down plucked from goslings in their youth.

She longed for something golden or green, for the youth

of saplings as they stretch up to the sun, needing more and more

every day.  She wanted once again to dance through the cotton

fields as they spread their seeds.  Like a postcard photograph

the poppies would all bloom, gold and violet and red,

and their pollen would cling to her hair and her dress, a handful

of summer fairy dust.  In the long winter nights she had her hands full

of old daisy chains and pressed petals, stripped of youth

by january’s chill.  One by one, she pasted them all onto little red

valentines, her fingers shaking and tired, until she had more

hearts and dead flowers than she could count.  No photograph

could keep them alive, as no enchantment of the sun could keep the cotton

from blowing away in the wind.  While the world was draped in a cold cotton-

white she sat resigned, but in march was she ever a handful!

when the first green appeared in the snow, slowly showing through like a photograph

developing, her body remembered all the wildness and youth

it had lost when the leaves fell and the flowers wilted.  She needed more

of the life she saw growing, digging through snow and earth until her hands bled red.

Growing with the cotton, changing with the seasons of youth,

living and dying as inevitably as a handful of daisies; it’s hard to tell anymore,

but in this photograph, as we sit on her summer swing, our lips are stained red, red, red. 

siren song

January 24, 2010

siren song

why do people come here, to our city?

with their gaudy cameras

and their alien language,

not caring to know the place

but just to visit here,

like a museum of a faraway land

except the sky is still the same.

I expect they still throw their coins

into the trevi fountain,

a constant stream of people going through

and through and through and

you never notice the faces that are gone

because there are so many more to replace them;

when they gape at the cathedrals,

I think they must tell themselves not to look too high,

or they would notice

that the sky is still the same. 

I suppose, then

that this need to escape – this wanderlust – is universal;

I’ve traveled too, experienced the whirlwind,

been part of the mindless, meaningless masses,

but I’ve always tried to settle down,

to stop the perpetual motion, the endless cycle,

and always,

it eventually strikes me (and kills me)

that the sky is still the same. 

it makes me wonder if that’s the answer to this great mystery;

if that’s why all the people feel the need to keep moving,

to keep going through and through and through,

because maybe they’re secretly afraid

that if they truly stop to look around

they’ll know that they can never really leave what they’ve left,

because the sky will always be the same. 

even-ing musing

November 21, 2009

even-ing musing

i.

I felt like snow today.

the weather disagreed, and I inquired the reason.

I’m not sad enough, it confided.

but why do you have to be sad to feel like snow?

that’s just the way it is, replied the weather.

that’s how it works.

funny.

I felt like snow, but I wasn't sad at all.

ii.

it makes me smile,

this time,

the even-ing of the day,

when the clarity of the sky

and the silhouette trees

make it look like it could be sunrise,

but it’s not.

           

like something you meant to say,

or words on the tip of your tongue:

it’s the self-same phenomenon.

           

iii.

I often long

to go out

and chase the moon. 

           

maybe,

this time,

if I weave together

enough cross-hatched

shooting stars,

I can toss a celestial net

into the darkness

and keep for myself

this feeling of twilight.

           

maybe I’ll try it again
          tomorrow.