Blog - Wednesday Poems

Image:  Just Ducky, oil on canvas, 12” x 12”

I’ve been in full fall mode lately, loving this, my favourite season - so today’s Wednesday Poem is another one celebrating autumn.  Autumn Pantoum (from my book Suddenly, So Much; Exile Editions) is yet another one featuring birds. The form I chose for it is a pantoum (see blog # 20, On Hands and Knees, for how this works).  I do love how the refrain lines tumble and cascade through the stanzas, ending the poem where it began, but that first/final line containing so much more at the end.

This poem, like last week’s, also builds on a line borrowed from another poet.  The opening (and closing) line, in italics, is from Elegy 10 in George Bowering’s Kerrisdale Elegies (Talon), which to me still stands out as one of the best Canadian poetry books ever.  And, earlier this week I got an email that makes it even more fitting to post this poem now.

There is a proposal to install the Bowering Collection and Reading Room in Special Collections at the University of British Columbia. Fundraising is underway for this and there is a pretty short turnaround time:  $500,000 needs to be raised by the end of December.  So far they’ve raised @$137,000 in donations and pledges.  All donations will receive a tax receipt issued by UBC. If you have any questions about the pledge or donation process, please do not hesitate to contact Katherine at katherine.kalsbeek@ubc.ca or 604-822-2819. UBC has also set up a designated giving page https://give.ubc.ca/bowering-collection


Autumn Pantoum


Each quick appearance is a farewell —
the leaves blush and wave goodbye;
goodbye, goodbye to green, everything
eventually dies.

The leaves blush and wave goodbye,
even the junco trilling hello
eventually dies
down, rejoicing becomes requiem.

Even the junco trilling 'hello
cold' is a sign of beginning, of winter coming
down.  Rejoicing becomes requiem.
This small bird sings for angels and ghosts.

Cold is a sign of beginning, of winter coming
with white ideas of ice and snow.
This small bird sings for angels and ghosts
rummaging at dusk under a grove of oaks.

With white ideas of ice and snow,
mallards abandon the lake and rushes
to rummage at dusk under a grove of oaks,
butting their beaks at the leaves.  They mutter.

Mallards abandon the lake and rushes —
I hear them after dark when they should be asleep,
butting their beaks at the leaves.  They mutter
goodbye at last.  Listen,

I hear them after dark when they should be asleep.
Goodbye.  Goodbye to green.  Everything,
goodbye at last.  Listen —
each quick appearance is a farewell.

 

Image: Leaving, acrylic on canvas, 18” x 24”

This Thanksgiving weekend it will be twelve years since we moved to our home on Pender Island. To mark the occasion, I’ve chosen Leaving (from Belonging, Sono Nis) for this week’s Wednesday Poem.

This is another of those rare ‘gift’ poems.  A friend had recently told me she was leaving her 25-year marriage, and as I thought about all that must mean for her life, my mind wandered off to partings of my own. Just two of several I recalled were how hard it had been when I finally decided to leave a political group I’d been in for several years; and then, decades later, what it had been like when I left a job I’d thought I’d stay in until I retired.  Once I finally picked up my pen to write, the poem simply emerged, all but intact.


LEAVING


We take one step at a time when we leave
a love, a job, a belief
after spending days, perhaps months, years
dismissing doubts,
their presence, ripples in the air
that can be as soft as moths
wings we pretend are only
the ordinary in and out of our breath – 
clouds against windows
clear, and one day we see our world differently,
feel our hands press against that glass,
the cold of it flinging us back
one last time
into the heart of a home we have known
where each piece in its usual place
seems rearranged
as if we are already gone

 

Image:  Photograph: Robin in Berries

We are in full election swing here in BC, as well as in New Brunswick and Saskatchewan; and the pundits are all trying to predict when the next federal election will be. All this on top of the intense electioneering south of us and so much other distressing, often horrific, news from around the world. Which brought to mind my poem Whisper Songs (from Suddenly, So Much; Exile Editions). So I’ll make it this week’s Wednesday Poem (even though it’s a tad early for the wintery references...). This series of seven poems is known as a Crown of Sonnets. I won’t normally post such a long poem here, but this one really needs to be read as a whole. A bit more about the form and the unusual, for me, process of writing the series follows the poem.


Whisper Songs

"…there is a phenomenon called the "whisper song" in which the bird sings almost inaudibly, as though in the back of its throat, so quietly that one must be very close in order to hear it." — John A. Livingston  (Rogue Primate)

1.

An ordinary draft disturbs the curtain,
lets morning whisper in, a brief surprise —
sunlight wavers, then goes out again,

a candle snuffed, another shuttered eye
and day descends weighted with regret.
More cloud, more cold; rain turns to flurries

turn to rain — even the weather forgets
what it's supposed to do.  Voices scramble
into the room, the news a breakfast of threats

I wish I could ignore.  Listen to the babble
and destruction pouring in, the gossip and thunder,
the conviction.  I'd rather sweet nothings — fragile

vows, nonsense words, the lust of love-birds,
the hustle of buds bursting the seams of winter.

2. 

The hustle of buds bursting the seams of winter,
a dream away — these days reluctant stubs
of their summer selves.  Chimney-smoke lingers,

the air sweet-scented with indifference.  A mob
flaps at the feeder, another squabble in the chill
drags on.  (What whisper songs?)  Seeds like crumbs

from the table of unlikely gods are trampled and spill,
attracting mice — and mice find all the flaws
in our foundation.  We poison them.  A little

life is taken just because it crawled
to us for shelter — and we are not ashamed,
refill the feeder because we want to be awed

by finches and chickadees, their antics, the untamed
feasting outside our window, unafraid.
         
3.

Feasting outside our window, unafraid
though a merlin lives nearby, sparrows festoon
the bamboo, preen their muted plumage and wait

their turn the way we wait for change.  In the woods
sap begins to run, a sure sign.  Spring thaw
always starts with a trickle.  It dawdles, then pools

in our hearts, hope tiptoeing in to sprawl
on the couch — an old friend who never left.
When the cold snap comes hope fades as fast as the hawk

snatches food.  Somehow I never expect
a varied thrush in its talons.  From the brambles, a clamour
in the key of grief, a slight shudder when the breath-

less wind settles.  Hidden in Douglas firs
a flicker clings to the bark and starts to hammer.

4.  

A flicker clings to the bark and starts to hammer
in a language we think we understand.  The tempo
insists we listen again, dares us to measure

the space between each beat, imagine echoes
that live there.  Out of the shadows, a coyote appears,
a grey hesitation.  She holds something in her yellow

stare, poised on the periphery where need meets fear
and contemplates.  The flicker changes his tune
to laughter — the song, a haunted mockery piercing

the air, mocking the coyote's indecision
or mocking mine.  Then the coyote, in one smooth leap,
leaps over thorns into the afternoon.

Above the garden long since gone to seed,
overcast hours drift on, seamlessly.
 
5.

Overcast hours drift on, seamlessly
shifting tenses.  A wayward breath is intent
on shaking loose the silver gleam we see

in the drop that clings to a leaf — the not yet
and the irrepressible now.  The wait for a wish
almost granted; the song in a whispered moment

almost heard.  Perhaps I've grown deaf to riffs
floating over my head, euphonious hymns
from a world beyond my eager reach, my stiff

wings.  Far off, two bald eagles hem
a ragged cloud, then ride thermals — feather
and wind, adrift and dreaming, carry them

into the infinite.  When they return they offer
no answer, only an elegant will to endure.

6.

No answer.  Only an elegant will to endure
where anything can happen (and soon).  We know  
too much and too little to rely on gestures

toward faith we keep making.  (A prayer said, sotto
voce, against aggression; then after it happens,
the vigil, a crowd gathered in darkness, holding

hands and candles.)  A wing-beat before sundown,
the feral world around me seems to retreat
in the last light, a quiet so intimate even

rooks rephrase their accusations, their bleak
prophecies — though the roost is in the crosshairs
of survey crews and planners.  Who will speak

up for troublesome crows, when all across
the city, rush hour idles at the crossroads.

7.

City rush hour idles at the crossroads,
a grey hesitation filled with echoes, imagined
and real, incantations from restless shadows    

where a coyote stands in the rain.  As night beckons
to fragile, sotto voce vows, a delicate
light wavers around neglected questions

in the irrepressible now.  In the not yet,
an eagle and hawk drift toward spring thaw
while unlikely gods pause to contemplate

the reluctant heart — how it can still be awed
watching sparrows feast, undeterred.
Bursting through seams of indifference, today at dawn

a whispered song was sung (and almost heard) when
an ordinary draft disturbed the curtain.


I was still working in my paid day job in Vancouver when I wrote Whisper Songs, and had little time to devote to poetry.  But I was itching to write!  I’d had the Livingston epigraph in my mind for a while (a long-time favourite from a favourite book on the environment – ground breaking when it came out).  One evening, sitting in my study late at night, I wrote the epigraph on the top of a piece of paper.  After a while, the first two lines of the poem seemingly dropped from the sky. I loved their rhythm, their possibilities – but couldn’t seem to take them any further.  So the next night, I went back to the lines, thought about them, and took up my pen again – another line.  But no more.  This process felt magical; it was like I entered a new and delicious space, but each time, only briefly (usually when I get into that creative zone, time disappears and hours pass). It went on for days and days; often I would start by tweaking the lines written the night before, then finding my way into a new line or two – rarely more – until the poem was finished.

A Crown of Sonnets is a form that combines a traditional sonnet structure with a particular refrain pattern.  The refrain is what drew me in:  There are seven sonnets; the first line in the first poem is the last line of the last poem.  In addition, the last line of the first sonnet is the first line of the next and so on throughout the poem. In Whisper Songs, I’ve used three line stanzas with very near (sometimes distant!) rhymes (patterned aba, bcb, cdc, ded) and a closing couplet (ee). And instead of counting strong/weak accents to determine the metre, I used – usually five – strong accents per line.

 

Image:  Bluebird, acrylic on canvas board,10” x 10”  (mounted on wood panel)

Well, we’ve just passed the fall equinox, which to me calls for an autumn poem. So I chose Adieu (from my book Suddenly, So Much; Exile Editions) for this week’s post. It’s another poem with a bird reference at the beginning, in a line I borrowed from Patrick Lane (1939 – 2019), one of my all-time favourite poets.  His line (in italics) which opens my poem is taken from Little Birds, in his book Too Spare,Too Fierce (Harbour).

The other reason this poem resonates with me just now, is that a few weeks ago, I went on a tour of our beautiful Pender Island cemetery. It was led by a representative of our local museum, who gave us an overview about the graveyard, then walked us to a couple of areas where early settlers rest – and told fascinating stories about their lives, the legacies they left for us. I will be honoured to lie in that field when my time comes
 

Adieu



There is not much time.  The birds sing of winter
though the leaves light up the air with their dying.
Sumachs scorch their fingers, burn at the end to hail
heaven where poplars

drizzle down from their great green heights to the ground
wearing gold, a last fling with the brilliant
chill.  Is this praise or defiance; is it God
or the coffin

that leaves us trembling when we drift away
from the gravestones and the unknown: — how long do we have;
are the dead we mourn part of the song or are they
simply gone


It will be a green burial for me, so no coffin.  And at the end I am sure I will be thinking of Dorothy Livesay’s marvellous epigram:  “I shall lie like this when I am dead / but with one more secret in my head.”
 

Image:  For the Birds (study), oil and cold wax on paper

I’ve been thinking about sandpipers lately.  How I miss seeing them during their migration through my home turf back in New Brunswick.  They arrive every year to feed on the mud shrimp and other treats they find along the Bay of Fundy Shores, especially at Shepody Bay near Johnson’s Mills.  That’s just a few miles from where I grew up, but I wasn’t really aware of these delightful little birds and their passage until I was an adult, visiting from British Columbia, where I now live.  The sandpipers feast on the mudflats from July to September every year, almost doubling their weight as they prepare for their 72-hour, non-stop flight back to South America.

This week’s Wednesday Poem, then, is Bird Watcher at Dorchester Cape, from my book, Belonging (Sono Nis). I used ‘poetic license’ when it came to the title.  Dorchester Cape isn’t, technically, where you go to see the sandpipers – but it is very close to Johnson’s Mills, and at first I confused the two.  So when I wrote the poem, I used Dorchester Cape; when I discovered I had the place name wrong, I left it in the title anyway … because to my ear it just sounds better.

Bird Watcher at Dorchester Cape

But occasionally, when he least expects it,
in the glass of a wave a painted fish
like a work of art across his sight
reminds him of something he doesn't know

            "Poor Bird"      P.K. Page

How could she miss them, pale tan on the mud flats;
a myriad of peeps here somewhere, come from away to feed –
she stands at the edge of a gravel road straining to see.
The tide nibbling in and the bright bluebells
twitching with Queen Anne's lace in the wind, at first
fill up her eyes.     Then the land begins to lift:
again and again, all those birds, blurred air, composed profusion
the perfect music of a fugue, this synchronicity
in a winged field.     Something inside her shifts.
But occasionally, when she least expects it

a lone sandpiper stays behind, too intrigued
with its small patch of tidal land to fly
off in the hope of finding what it already has.
Dashing this way and that, it drills in familiar ground,
each spot offering something
undiscovered, something the whole flock missed.
The solitaire scatters prints along the shore
until suddenly, in the wash of the oncoming tide
it halts; stares at the water as if
in the glass of a wave a painted fish

appears, brilliant fins stiff in its liquid home,
an exotic body rising from the depth of somewhere else
and with each breath of the bay, drifting closer
to the sandpiper's feet, a colourful puzzle.
She observes the stillness of the bird –  
imagines it will soon take flight,
half hoping it will find
its designated place in the flock, returning now,
a curvature of movement, brown and white
like a work of art across her sight,

a restless sketch, sunlit into diamonds and topaz,
the radiance luring her gaze away
from the odd sandpiper enchanted, she thinks, by the tide.
She blinks in disbelief at jewelled air,
the like of which she's never seen before.
The glitter flutters briefly, then the show
dissolves to camouflage.     Her heart beats wild as wings
when the solitaire breaks its trance to race
straight into the multitude, whose safe shadow
reminds her of something she doesn't know.

 

Bird Watcher at Dorchester Cape, is a glosa on P.K. Page's glosa (Poor Bird), which is a glosa on Elizabeth Bishop's poem Sandpiper.  Page describes the glosa form as "... the opening quatrain written by another poet; followed by four ten-line stanzas, their concluding lines taken consecutively from the quatrain; their sixth and ninth lines rhyming with the borrowed tenth." (Hologram, A Book of Glosas, Brick).  For a change, in this poem, I abided by all the elements of the form rather than omit or vary bits – though the rhymes here are as often close as they are perfect (meaning only some of the sounds in the rhyming words are similar, as opposed to having all but the beginning sound in those words match).

Insomnia has been a fairly regular companion of mine lately, and it struck again earlier this week.  As I lay wide awake, I remembered going through spates of this when we lived in Vancouver, and how on one of those occasions I began composing a short sequence of poems – so I’ve chosen those for this Wednesday’s post.  The sequence is modelled after the form Brian Bartlett created for his poem, Shuffles, a combination of anagram and haiku features.  A couple of years ago, after artist Annie Smith taught me how to make accordion books, I put together a few, in a limited edition of 3 each (these are labour intensive!).  The only one still available is the last copy of the Midnight Relay accordion book (image above).

Midnight Relay

Run off their feet, wet
creatures munch to music.  Night
rains on little leaves.


            *


            Creatures munch rain,
            run off on little feet –
            leave their wet night to music.


            *


Feet run on, rain leaves
their music wet. Creatures munch off
little tonight.


            *


            Night run.  Two little
            creatures munch off leaves.  Rain on, music.
            Wet their feet.

      
                                                                                            - from Cedar Cottage Suite (Leaf Press)
 

The idea for the anagram side of things is to use the same words in each stanza, arranged differently each time, but here I tweaked this in various small ways. For example, I changed “to” to “two” in the last stanza and combined “to” and “night” into “tonight” in the third.  Kate Braid and I talk a bit more about Brian’s form for his Shuffles in the Lipogram chapter of In Fine Form: A Contemporary Look at Canadian Poetry (Caitlin Press).

Image: “After breakfast and for the rest of the day we were greasing the ventilators to make them easier to turn. Took them all off and scraped old grease off. Then we red leaded the inside of them. I had Tim take a picture of me inside cowl of one.” (Jack Shreve, Journal entry, April 29,1936.)

My friend Pam Galloway (a fine poet!) sent me a lovely note last week from her home in Manchester, England. She belongs to a poetry appreciation group, which she explained is “one of the offerings of the U3A which is ‘University of the Third Age’, a national organisation which brings people of retirement age together to share their talents and skills.”  Since they were to meet the day after Labour Day, their theme was work.  And Pam’s contribution to the discussion was one of the poems from my book, Waiting for the Albatross (Oolichan), a collection of poems I crafted using segments from the diary my father, Jack Shreve, wrote at age 21 while working on a tramp freighter during the Great Depression (for more about this book, check out my Books page).  So, with thanks to Pam for that honour, and to celebrate Labour Day (a few days after the fact), this week’s Wednesday Poem is On Hands and Knees.

On Hands and Knees

This life isn’t all it's cracked up to be –
painting with cement wash
on hands and knees;
red leading all day, then

more painting with cement wash.
Not an exceptionally hard job
to red lead the ventilators –
but dirty as hell.

Not an exceptionally hard job to soak rags
in “transmission grease”, either –
but dirty as hell,
oiling decks and steam pipes.

We soak rags in “transmission grease”
and apply with vigour
when oiling decks and steam pipes.
Chipped rust off the forepeak bulkhead

then with vigour
cleaned coal out of winches and
chipped more rust and paint in forepeak.
Filthy dirty, clothes and everything to-night.
 

Cleaned coal out of winches,
soogeed bridge and midship decks.
Filthy dirty, clothes and everything to-night.
Had a bath after supper, in a bucket!

Soogeed bridge and midship decks
on hands and knees;
had a bath after supper, in a bucket.
This life isn't all it's cracked up to be.

A couple of notes about terms used in this poem:  Cement wash is a cement mixture used to protect steel from salt water corrosion. Red lead is a paint compound containing lead tetroxide (which is highly toxic), that was used as a rust inhibitor on iron and steel.  Soogee is a cleaning product.

On Hands and Knees is a pantoum, one of my favourite poetic forms. As with most of the poems in this book, forms featuring refrains were my go-to approach, as I felt they worked well as a metaphor for the repetitive nature of life at sea. I particularly like the way the refrains in a pantoum cascade down through the stanzas with a kind of rocking motion. Here, I was a bit loose with the refrains, varying them when it suited the narrative of the poem.  The repetition pattern for a pantoum is: lines 2 and 4 of the first stanza become lines 1 and 3 of the next, and so on to the end, where lines 3 and 1 of the first stanza become lines 2 and 4 of the last, so the poem ends as it begins – but with that final line containing so much more than it did at the start. For more about this form, and other examples of how several other poets have approached it, see In Fine Form: A Contemporary Look at Canadian Form Poetry (Caitlin) which Kate Braid and I co-edited.

Image: Bowl of Fruit, 11” x 14”, acrylic on canvas

This week I received a copy of my Quebecois friend Lou Lemelin’s latest zine .  There are three so far, each a short pamphlet featuring her character Omalou’s poignant life stories, illustrated with her delightful line drawings. As she explained to me in her translation of the first one, “Omalou is my avatar; in real life, it’s my granny name; Oma is Granny in Dutch.”  The latest zine is called Omalou et Satan, and is “dedicated to all those who suffered, as children, the cruelty of religions. To all women who, even today, feel guilty, inadequate, unsure of themselves and doubt their value or the legitimacy of their choices.”  Like her first two zines, this one makes a powerful statement – no surprise coming from a woman with a long history of storytelling through decades of award-winning journalism and documentaries.

Her subject reminded me of my poem, Glassy Apples, which riffs off the biblical Eve as temptress tale, turning it upside down by empowering Eve and taking Satan out of the picture entirely, replacing him with an ordinary worm. 

Glassy Apples

            —after the painting by Mary Pratt

The truth is, the snake had nothing at all to do with it, in fact
was not even a serpent, but a worm poking his little head
out of an apple as Eve passed by

                                                      gathering food in the orchard
for her wedding and the green maggot wanted an invitation
to the feast. Being a woman,

                                              Eve knew all about
buffets, how a table should please the eye first, then the palate,
so she plucked only the finest fruit. Set aside

                                                                        one particular
red delicious, its skin as smooth as her own and Adam's youth,
sliced it open to expose the magic

                                                       pentacle centre, perfect
brown seeds in a bed white as sheets – for luck and long life as
each bit into half, sealing

                                        their marriage vows,
and all in the garden cheered, except the worm who cursed
the whole affair from afar, vowed

                                                     revenge, thought up
the story of forbidden fruit while he watched the guests gobble
what he wanted:

                          those gorgeous apples in glass bowls,
on that glass table top she put there on purpose to catch
the glimmer of sun

                               on his favourite fruit, placed in calm
repose upon a bed of reflections where tongues of light
licked skin, now burnished

                                          to a passion he'd never imagined
possible, and kept where he couldn't get at it. I'll make
them pay for this, he snickered,

                                                          gripping his pen
and, knowing a grub was too abhorrent to be believed
even in Paradise,

                             used snake as pseudonym, named
Eve temptress, Adam sinner, and invented a God
of vengeance; kept his eye

                                            on the glitter of envy and
avarice while he made up shame and never even noticed
at the bottom of it all, left of centre, his own

                                                                      small heart
bursting with unrequited love.

Glassy Apples is one of three ekphrastic poems I wrote after visiting Mary Pratt’s exhibition, The Substance of Light, at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 1996 (see Wednesday Poem #9: Improvisation for another approach to the form).  A note to this poem in my book Suddenly, So Much (Exile Editions) explains the wedding vow reference: “At Gypsy weddings it was customary for the bride and groom to cut the apple, revealing its pentacle, and eat half apiece. Such marriage customs may suggest the real story behind Eve’s sharing an apple with her spouse.” – Barbara G Walker, The Women’s Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects, Harper & Rowe, 1988, p. 480).

Image:  Come Dance With Me (oil and cold wax on cradled panel, 16” x 16”)

Tonight, the Lantern Festival will once again take place at Vancouver’s Trout Lake Park. This festival started out as the Illuminares, organized by the Public Dreams Society in 1989. At the time, we lived just up from the park, and the festival was meant to be a local arts and culture event, a model for other city communities to take up in their neighbourhoods.  As it happened, the Trout Lake festival became such a big hit, everyone flocked to it rather than create the intended smaller events throughout the city. In just a few years it grew to attract thousands of people. 

We stopped going when it got so crowded you could hardly take in any of the acts.  But that first one – it was so very special.  A few hundred people from the area gathered to slowly walk around the lake, lanterns in hand, pausing often to enjoy a variety of performances. A choir of women singing in the huge willow tree by the swimming area; a musician playing jazz (saxophone, as I recall) on a raft in the middle of the lake; fire breathers and jugglers and more at other stops.  A highlight for me that year was two men dancing. It looked to me like they were performing some kind of martial art in tandem. Not as battle, but as beauty.  Which is what inspired me to write Dance (from my book, Bewildered Rituals, Polestar Press) – today’s Wednesday Poem.

Dance

This is how the body can move –
with grace and fortitude.
Remember them, two men
to the beat of one drum,
their gymnastic limbs swinging
over and under, around
in the soft night air of a park;
karate kicks just this far from skin
never come to blows;
hands open into air
slow motion, a precision pose –
anger transformed to the beautiful
in a dance.

In a dance,
anger transformed to the beautiful
slow motion, a precision pose –
hands open into air
never come to blows;
karate kicks just this far from skin
in the soft night air of a park,
over and under, around
their gymnastic limbs swinging
to the beat of one drum.
Remember them, two men
with grace and fortitude –
This is how the body can move.
 

A year or so after I watched these men dance, we visited Pender Island, where I picked up a chapbook that included a palindrome – a poetic form I’d not encountered before (see Wednesday Poem #10 for more about this). It struck me that this form might nicely embody the back and forth movement of the dance I saw during that first magical Illuminares festival.

Image:  Anything Is Possible (acrylic on canvas, 16” x 20”)

I love synchronicity.  Today’s Wednesday Poem is #17… and in a few days, on August 17^th, it will be Bill’s and my 45^th anniversary.  So, a love poem seems appropriate for this week.

Although tulips are not mentioned in the poem, I chose this image of abstracted tulips to pair with it, largely because of the title I gave the painting. It’s an early one, and one of the first I did that I felt succeeded.  I never imagined I would be able to paint, but just a couple of years after first picking up a brush, I managed this one.  So I called it Anything Is Possible.  In a way, that title suits this anniversary, too – because, all those years ago, when our friends heard we were getting married after being together for just five months, most said “it’ll never last”.  Well, here we are… and here, to honour love’s longevity, is my poem Touch, from my 1997 collection, Belonging (Sono Nis Press).

Touch

for Bill 

This morning’s sun lingers in our yard,
sheds gold on leaves –
eases up the stairway to our porch,
a casual presence

so like the lightness of your hand along my back
as you amble past me, out the door.
A filigree of touch, so delicate
I stand in stillness,

savour every subtle path your fingers traced,
their warmth of reassurance.
I bask in what we take for granted,
this absent-minded, second-nature care

blooms on and on like garden gloriosa,
saffron streaked with fire, their daisy faces
tilt imperceptibly to catch the sun’s caresses –

the way we turn to one another
with these small moments always in our hands.