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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Join the local literary & UVic communities as poets & authors celebrate the life of the late Patrick Lane. This evening of poetry and tribute to the acclaimed poet and late UVic Department of Writing professor Patrick Lane will feature readings and memorials by a number of Writing alumni, including emcee Steven Price, Esi Edugyan, […]
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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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