In a series of synchronistic events a poem I wrote has come back to me more than thirty years after I wrote it and almost twenty years since I had disavowed it and forgotten it! I had forgotten that a dear friend, Sarah Wilson, copied out the poem in her distinctive and wonderful script with […]
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LAST WATER SONG It was not the water you tried to find when you were young. That was the water that lost you. You climbed trees to look and the water was there. You walked on the earth and the water was nowhere. That was the losing water. This water is the finding water. It […]
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April 28, 2020 – 11:46 am
A WOMAN PAINTED ON LEAF I found it among curios and silver in the pureness of wintry light. A woman painted on a leaf. Fine lines drawn on a veined surface in a hand-made frame. This is not my face. Neither did I draw it. A leaf falls in the garden. The moon cools its […]
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Only Child Even though I’m an only child, no one can remember what time I was born. Dad was sure it was midnight, he heard the whistle of the train going north. Aunt Valada said it was early morning, just after she saw the milkman on Princess Street. Mum couldn’t recall the time. She said […]
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An excerpt from Milford and Me – An Illustrated Kid’s Book (Milford in this poem/book is a small turtle) We walk along down by the turnips. There is no one but Milford and me. We’ve been sharing a cucumber sandwich is the shade of a very tall pea. There are things I don’t know about, […]
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December 31, 2019 – 5:52 pm
Leaving Green Montreal, hot-as-hell August 1968. I lope along an early morning side street of modest homes wearing a black boy’s body, swinging the biggest boom box you ever saw in one hand, finger-snapping time with the other, my lips mouthing Motown all around the town, oooh ya! Oh, sure, I’m watching the boy from […]
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December 26, 2019 – 10:35 pm
Collect for the Homeless God of the broken night. Finder of empty doorways, shopping carts, cardboard blankets, fast food refuse, cigarette butts, dropped coins and nick of time naloxone kits. May your infinite attention be the thin layer of softness between weary bodies and cold pavement, may it be a cloak to shelter children from […]
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December 24, 2019 – 5:41 pm
God Walks Burning Through Me When I sleep the birds come to the garden With their gifts of seeds. Out of ice last year’s leaves of grass lift into night. All my songs have been one song. The palm of my hand and the sole of my foot remember everything I have forgotten. […]
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April 20, 2019 – 10:39 am
So this is it, Lane. Not a living wake, but a celebration of all your living. And this is only the beginning. Wait until you’re dead. Susan Musgrave, editor, from You Loved Being a Stranger – 55 Poets Celebrate Patrick Lane, Harbour Publishing, 1994 There are times when I no longer know if what I […]
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ALONE ON CHRISTMAS EVE IN JAPAN Not wanting to lose it all for poetry. Wanting to live the living. All this year looking on the graveyard below my apartment. Holding myself tenderly in this marred body. Wondering if the quiet I feel is that happiness wise people speak of, or the modulation that is the […]
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