March 18, 2019 – 10:29 pm
Two exquisite, yet for me enigmatic, poems by the Canadian poets Lorna Crozier and Patrick Lane, partners for more than forty years before Patrick’s death eleven days ago. This broadsheet hangs in my home office and I revisit it now again. And every time I feel happily lost in a lyric mysteriousness, much the way […]
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March 16, 2019 – 10:09 am
The benefit of cleaning up a chaotic office! Finding this exquisite small poem by Patrick Lane. As I remember him telling me, and here my memory may be a touch thin in places, this poem was part of a larger piece and his “Beloved”, Lorna Crozier, told him this was the poem! I appreciate the […]
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March 15, 2019 – 10:59 pm
EARLY ONE SUMMER Years from now someone will come upon a layer of birds and not know what he is listening for these are the days when the beetles hurry through dry grass hiding pieces of light W.S. Merwin from Migration: New and Selected Poems, Copper Canyon Press, 2005 What a great poem to celebrate […]
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ASSINIBOINE Deep summer nights and you, far off, quiet in the dawn. That last morning the mute swans were on the river and I was unclean. I placed hot stones in water as you told me of the old people beside the slow current singing. If I look hard enough I believe I can see […]
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Half-Hearted Moon Sometimes I don’t feel anything. It’s best to be with people when I do. I stare across the coke and whiskey at Jimmy and Moon. We are talking about nothing. The half-hearted night stumbles up the cracked pane and no one cares. Moon is crying and there is nothing I can do. She […]
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When I Sleep 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. The old lantern by […]
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September 29, 2018 – 7:18 am
A poet friend of mine is getting married today. And in a brief text exchange she invited me to remember how I felt the day I took my vows with my wife Somae. A great reminder of that day for me and the grace those vows have brought into my life. Thank you M. And […]
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February 13, 2018 – 10:04 pm
The Beauty This too, the beauty of the antelope in snow. Is it enough to say we will imagine this and nothing more? Who understands that, failing, falters at the song. But still we sing. That is beauty. But it is not an answer any more than the antelope most slender of beasts most beautiful […]
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December 21, 2017 – 11:24 pm
Solstice A sly gift it is, that on the year’s shortest day, the sun stays longest in this house – extends the wand of its slow slant and distant squint farthest into the long depths of our wintry rooms – to touch with tremulous light, interior places it has not lit before. Robyn Sarah […]
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February 8, 2017 – 8:56 pm
Epigraph from Motto In the dark times Will there also be singing? Yes, there will be singing About the dark times. Bertolt Brecht: Poems 1913-1956, edited by John Willett and Ralph Manheim, Eyre Methuen, 1976 This gorgeous, difficult, heart-breaking world. What do we poets do with it? Brecht says we must sing about it. His […]
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