April Fool
Summer Solstice
The Retreat
Mad Cow Disease
Wedding Gifts
Martin and Lewis
Ten2
Man in the Moon
Consider the Spider
Mothers and Daughters
Rat-Free Province
Poem for a Reading in a Bar
Out of Chaos, Order
Latimer’s Statement to the Police
Radio Silence
Twins
Dec. 6, Montreal
The Spreiser
Saving Souls
Leave Wife
Skin of Our Teeth
Baghdad
Faith, Hope, Charity
Ghosts and Poets at Batoche
The Immense Noise
Fathers
That Summer
Radio Silence
Twenty-Fifth Reunion
Community
Barium Moon
A Warm February
Many of the poems in this collection have appeared, often in earlier versions, in the following magazines and anthologies: Ariel, Border Crossings, Canadian Forum, Canadian Literature, CV2, Cross-Canada Writers Quarterly, Dalhousie Review, Dandelion, diverge, Fiddlehead, Grain, League of Canadian Poets’ Museletter, NeWest Review, Poetry Canada Review, Pottersfield Portfolio, Prairie Fire, Queen’s Quarterly, Textual Studies in Canada, This Magazine, Towards 2000 (Fifth House Publishers), Vallum, Vintage 1991 (Sono Nis Press), and Windsor Review.
Some poems were broadcast on the CBC programs Ambience and Gallery.
“The Persistent Suitor” won the Stephen Leacock Poetry Award from the Orillia International Poetry Festival in 1996. “On the Beach” won second prize in the 1997 Saltwater Poetry Contest. “Dec. 6, Montreal” won second prize in the League of Canadian Poets’ 1991 National Poetry Contest.
My thanks to the editors, producers, and judges.
Thanks also to the Saskatchewan Writers Guild’s colony committee, which operates writers and artists colonies at Emma Lake and St. Peter’s Abbey, Muenster, Saskatchewan, where many of these poems were written.
And especial thanks to Christine Lynn for Red Hue Moon, the painting on the cover.
And more thanks to George Amabile, whose lines “the purity of absence/kindles appetites that hiss/and fuse. One/last beginning,” from his poem “Tangents and Vectors,” are used, with permission, as an epigraph for my poem “Purity of Absence.” I heard George read his poem at Heaven bookshop in Winnipeg in spring 1996 and, struck by that phrase “the purity of absence,” immediately began my poem on the back of a napkin.
for Shaya
The farther you go
the closer you come
to every thing
you always thought
was out of your reach,
the perfect breathless moment
crystallizing,
evaporating.
This is the way
the world turns
itself inside out
of the way
beyond anything
you could imagine
the rising star
shaking off night
into the mouth
of a jealous sun
the rising star
casting its light
into the shining
eyes of the beholder
your light illuminating something we’ve never seen before.
Men are struck by lightning five times as often as women.
—Newspaper Item
Taller, of course,
more foolhardy, more’s
the fool, and more likely
to have forgotten an umbrella,
to be out walking and fail to notice
rain assailing our unprotected lives
the way your love can if we
let it, but that alone can’t explain
why our lives are in jeopardy,
why we take the chances no one
would reasonably assume we
should, not in this life
with all its teeth and broken glass.
Montreal haunts us the way livers
do drunks. Sick and complaining,
they insist we somehow are at fault,
we who take all the chances,
who put ourselves ahead
of whatever comes, that we brought
it on ourselves, and maybe we did.
Say something often enough
and even the liar starts to believe
it, let alone the altar boys,
lip-syncing the litany, big boys don’t cry, rats’ tails and snails, that’s what boys are made of.
When it does strike, lightning,
it doesn’t do it twice but over
and over again till we’ve got
the drill in our sleep, dreams
blossoming up like fish surfacing
with bubbles for kisses, till
the choices dry up, even the few
we started with. The house
is in darkness, the children
asleep, your breath steady as tide
on the pillow, the owl silent
in its tree. We lie awake,
listening for thunder.