1 New Poem

Backyard Creations

We were as monuments there,
lighting tree fires,
building carved knick-knacks
from firepit logs

Living with brambles tangled
in hair and strewn about
on mother’s carpet that we scented
in pine sap and oak chips
every once in blue moon passage,
every once when things had less
sense than now with clear
eyes.

I see the old shed come down,
its wasted-away tremor shade
switched for a newness in
fiberglass and careful-poured concrete,
with windchimes and cuckoo vanes
set out front.

It wasn’t that it was so
beloved to me, that hearts danced
on merry gilding edge when it
came by,

But it smelled of ash
(pine sap, old ways)
just the same.

1 New Poem

Hymn to Hillsborough Gardens

The rolling out of green passageway
hills must have reminded pale men
with leg chains in ship hulls of
the misty home counties;

why else would they
have graced these rocks with
names of kings, with Sunday’s
best, with three-prong electric
plugs?

As old as the flying places
were, top houses dotting the
bright, rococo Spanish shades,
the fixtures in sheet metal were new.

The telling ocean shade of
Samaritan tarps below pointed
to who was enough without
two silver coins to cross,
enough without a Labour Party
badge number, or enough without
fortunes in family names

to Brooklyn, or Rexdale,
or inner-ring London, that could
have lent a hand.

In rusting white time I watch,
hear the spray of ocean and
chop of housing lumber, again
like the timely overseer,
the court magistrate.

1 New Poem

Mood Music

Snow and silence traces me;
a figure still amidst the branches
and bright ice, contemplative
tripping up to follow the cacophony
of old rules being lost, time
flowing through in rusted
pipe logic.

The evergreen rains echoes,
rapping against shades that
clack-clatter through night,
stirring alive old festering
cuts, the bruise flesh
blue-white against knuckle.

Drafty windows become a bristle
chorus, tones breaking in ghostly
stride the silence left with
chalk trace of where were used
to sleep as den lions  though
winter:

nuzzling and withdrawn
from glinting teeth of other
tribes, the cross-heeding pound
of nighttime drums.