Notes Towards the Definition

Only walking out at night.
A peach with no pit
like a red car in the driveway.
The first footprints are grey
and long gone.

Phonetic spellings of common words.
The collections of childhood in cardboard boxes.
Stories that begin, "Did I tell you this already?"

What to do with waiting time.
Scrawled notes, scrawled again.
After each word the thought of eyes reading each word.

Weightless is the smell of a Greyhound bus
- its long windows.
Days without saying anything about mom.
Highways. Oh highways!

I am in love with the dotted yellow line.
I am a long way past and over now.
I have a long way to go.

Baseball Game

For your baseball team,
I would offer
the following suggestions
for improvement.

Find a man who can see
the back of his own head
and with his peripheral vision
rally mutants and dress them in yellow.

Insist that all batters hum
while at the plate, ballads,
or tunes to rally the heart
to lost causes, nothing religious.

For a mascot, I propose
the noble elephant - his
trunk-like bat in one hand,
his bat-like trunk where his nose should be.

On the subject of bats,
might we leave them
in a more tree-like state,
their roots still showing,
small clods of dirt spraying
with every swish through air?

The fans could be taller, I think.
The beer more Czech.

And the scores that must be settled,
recorded in digits so high that all of us watching
might feel that much is at stake.

Our humanity and hair styles,
our children's too.

That we might leave the stadium, blinking,
still set in the ways we came in with,
but knowing that these are the right ways
for certain this time.

35 to 32 should do it, I think.
Or, 57 to 53, to be safe.

Trent Radio 92.7 FM

Once during a radio interview,
I said a wish by accident
and it floated
off that high tower
and lazily over marsh grass.

Came down George St.
like a gunslinger -
the boots on that thing! -
extinguished every birthday candle in town
and just kept right on going.

Still out there, I bet
but softer and a long way from home.
A whisper along the Canadian Shield.
An echo in a Toronto suburb
A word held back in a stranger's mouth.

Last Times

The last time I saw you
you gave me your memoirs.
It was a ball of short strings tied together.
It was a catalogue of names.
You said -
I hope you like it.

The last time I saw you
was in Chicago.
You told me the story
of every knick knack on your mantle,
every tiny piece of glass.
It was carrying two cartons of milk up the stairs.
It was some words about God
and then some words about Oprah.

The last time I saw you
was Christmas Day.
We ate turkey and said
the cities where we lived,
the lives that we lived there.
After dinner you recited
to the living room fire
Out out brief candle.

Canada Day

My car is suspended
on wheels so high
it is hard to see
where June ends, July begins.

This small mishap
took place inside a bank.

Degrees on the thermometer,
like degrees inside the head,
sound tinny in cool weather,
and silent in warm.

The waiting room is full.
Your directions misleading.

I did not remember
the names at the party
and resorted to calling everyone buddy.

July now. I'm sure it's July.
The fireworks are known
in some circles as proof.

This languid month.
This yellow month.
This month leading so purposefully to August.

Glad You're Moving In

Perched on a stool,
as one be-speckled
gargoyle over Paris, my love.

As fine in a red shirt
as on a cold night
those two arms can sink
the ships of my heart
send up fireworks
to celebrate
the drowning of stars.

This part, my heart,
played by a ukulele orchestra
with toes, not fingers
on instruments crafted
by a master craftsman
and sold at auction.

I outbid, I did.

If afternoons
a lake stretched out
under the iron of July heat
then my heart
under the surface is
disturbing the fish.

Tell it plain -
you cannot go around
making a girl ineffectual like this,

cataloguing for a lover's almanac:
quantities of orange light
the subtle angle of collar bones,
all things whispered


Prediction:
another season
of missed appointments.

All this by way of saying
still crazy about you.
Still!

The Day MJ Died

It is 4:55 in Vancouver a Thursday,
the day after St. Jean Baptiste yes
it is 2009 and I try to call Heather
on the bus home from work but she doesn't pick up
and I think maybe she's working
the night shift at the hospital and
won't be home for hours.

I get off at Vine St. and
straight to the market where the
avacados spring back from my touch
and all the berries are rolling downhill
from ripe - everything smelling
of summer fingers.

It rained this morning,
but now blue skies. I get asked for
change twice before the bakery.
I want plain bread. Four rolls
to rip apart.

When I enter the apartment
he is listening to Billie Jean.
All the wires in the world
buzz with jokes
but I can only think of that snowstorm
in February of 1984. How I lay in the dark
of my best friend's bedroom
listening to Thriller
while the city filled with snow
and six blocks over my sister was born.