To James Nimmons

I need to say something, because I know you are still out there, humming and walking dusty roads and thinking about girls with horn-rimmed glasses and cat-ear hats. I know that you still think about me, as I think about you, as your body plunges into a sad state of thirty-hood… all the countries you planned to see, the careers you intended to conquer, the spacious consciousness you anticipated on inhabiting—all those far and deep and wide things, all mashed down now, narrow and slitty like your mother’s suspicious eyes. Well! Suddenly we find ourselves spiraling away to the farthest reaches of our respective private universes… and isn’t that what we always loved about each other—that we had “respective private universes” to spiral away to, and we built them well. Ha, kindred spirits is what we were… maybe what we still are. But I don’t know anymore. Doesn’t it suck sour frog butts that I don’t know anymore. But what it is that I wanted to say is that it was you, you, that shone in my darkest darkenesses, dim lightening-bug of a light though you were. You don’t scoff at a light when it’s your only light. Thank you, thank you thank you, for all those moments when you were my only light.

And the succession of dreams came crashing forth like so many forgotten supermarket children—clamoring and shrieking for a creamy lick of love. And the outpouring of grief and joy intermingled sent shocks down spines and through brains, like a mouthful of candies with sour centers, like too many mouthfuls of blue slurpee burning down too many eager throats. And we gave. And we gave. And we gave until all of our glass hearts shattered, shards floating sweetly about us, like halos, like clouds, like sugar and salt.

Late September, as we have it, is always a mindbender of a season, I mean, it’s always pushing in and sideways and trying out cold fingers at old locks. Before we know it, there are wells of anxiety and trembling tearing yearnings pooling at the base of our throats, the place where the warmest soft beat of life pulses. That supple spot. And don’t be forgetting that vulnerability is not a sign of weakness, oh no, it’s a sign of life, of life, of real, live, living life. And when you’re living a life, a North American, first-world kind of late September life, suddenly you are vulnerable in all kinds of ways, no matter what age you are, and vulnerable in the little guilty ways that aren’t actually problems like wars and famines are problems, so you don’t say anything about them. You just walk in the chilling air and breathe the warm fumes of dusty heating systems, and look at Hallowe’en decorations crowding in the windows of the dollar stores, (jostling for space with the omnipresent early Christmas decorations), you eat cold snappy apples and tootsie rolls and cream-of-mushroom soup, and have nightmares about your days at school or work. You think about how your life might have been different, had you walked through different doors or answered differently on a test. Joyous regrets and dubious hopes jostle in our inner windows, steaming them up and drawing pictures in the wet fog, we can’t see out, but suddenly we can see in, and we like it or we don’t, or we do and we don’t. New long yellow pencils, darkening greens of changing foliage, corridors reeking of ammonia and sawdust, cheap gold earrings, stiff brown suede shoes.

Simple

egg salad sandwiches from Tim Hortons
in the red truck I borrowed from my boss

that will be lunch for us today, for me and my boyfriend

our lunch hour is 30 minutes and we drive quickly as we eat--
we have to run home to let the chickens out--
we talk about the things we want and how
money is tight for now, but things will be fine
and where we want to live, to raise kids (one day)

we'll collect the eggs after work

we work at the same place
me in the office typing and faxing
and him in the yard
building things and cutting lumber

nights I waitress for extra cash
in a dingy country-style restaurant with
brown formica tables and cowboy regulars
(I feel like my intelligence is wasted there
and I want to paint and have friends who smoke
black cigarettes and wear fluvogs and
paint angsty paintings, talk about Edie Sedgwick and
modernism postmodernism unmodernism)

but for now everything is simple
in a white-trashy way
trying to build a pretty little future
and liking the sweet earthy taste
of hope

June, the dragonflies
appear-- glib emissaries
of damp and of light

regrets

light the biggest match, she said
good idea
warmth/heat/fire
because

theres that lit-t-le prickle of water-chill--
the deep end, the drop off,
the part where you dive in and the icy water clutcHES you
(yeah, that part)--

a lit-t-le bit of that stuck to the base of my spine, so

LIGHT the BIGGEST match
or maybe
SING
THE LOUDEST CAMPFIRE SONG
with a voice like an angry cello
do all the blasting heated summertime sparky things
to Roar Up the Inferno, to melt and scorch
and peel and blister

that stubborn cold patch

it
was put there
by a careless turn of the mind
and
responsibility dictates
responsibility-- that is, it is
my fault, my
fault altogether

I turned there
and now I can only turn to light some sort of pyre
to
(cleanse?)

whether you are held up
or held back
you have always held the means to release yourself

ten year reunion

smash razzle-dazzle isms
of sunshine on storm-washed Penticton streets
and here where we wandered drunkenly
the night before
no imprint of the raucous voices or
coarse delights

all washed away and under over into
something brighter and new and
bafflingly similar to
sodden wanderings and musings of the years before

fresh

what we were returns when the grime is swished away

all of us gathering
and unravelling the mysteries of who
and how did we become what did we were did you
how was that and when did they
the murmurs of rebuilding/regressing

familiar smells of the Okanagan earth

and we might come away with more of what
we already were

cougar tracks

space


fills out, breathing
and surrounds us
so time doesn't exist but space does
nt exist either


connect to

my young new love
time does
nt bother me but why when i speak to him
why do i condense my life so that
growinguphighschoolcollegeuniversity was just
something complicated that happened a few months ago and he

expands

so that all of the everything that made him twenty years old
actually took an eon

leaving the desert

everywhere I go
I am missing
someplace I'm not

so I might as well go
I might as well go, I tell myself

I try to convince myself
it's time to go

but the weight in my pockets
of the possibilities here
the possibilities everywhere

are tearing-- I want to stay but they are tearing through

holes in my pockets
everything I'm picking up is falling right through

maybe I'm leaving a trail
maybe I'm leaving clues

and I don't know what I'm hoping to find
or what I am hoping
might find me but

at least there's
some sort of indication that I was here
briefly
and how long
before the vultures and gypsies
carry even
my small bleached bone trail
away

so find me
or let me find my way

soon

whale song

we might be whales
in the underworld

the rabbit's ghost
pressed flat
to the midnight earth
had a message
for you

where were you?

oh, maybe in the garden of eels
oh, maybe in the garden
where the blue light fell
like chain-link in the grass
made you trip
didn't it

we might be whales
in the next life

what you see isn't
what you see
isn't what
is

it's so hard to train for the olympics
when you don't know
if it's winter or summer

orca or beluga
humpback or sperm
minke
oh, don't be a minke
Japanese people eat the minke

the mystic dixie cup
missed you in the
misty witches crux

waiting in the underworld
think you'll be
a humpback

they sing the nicest songs

dance in the morning

just shake your head loose
of all the night inside
jiggle, make that pajama thing work
wake and break through

dance in the morning!
dance in the morning!

he moved to hiroshima

what a wicked wonderful way to start the day
keyboardplastic cigarette smoke wafting over
partitions here but I am thinking about
you

oh farwaynear friend, newfound lover

I am smashed to pieces at your very words
mismanaged twofingered language burrrrred out from a bar
called Memories in Hiroshima City

you found me I found you
and the squealing gears and workings of my interiorthink
on the brink of a shift and grind
mechanicimagination

we can find other people
maybe we will

but

you can say things about slaves building pyramids and fujigrand
and punchinggodintheface and vinegaroos,
coconut candy, giant purple squid
the wasteland of dreams and the nicknames bestowed in a frathouse

and I gather you

every other bursting fragment of your being comesglittering
sharp and precious and I
(like a crow)
without thinking
pick it up to keep

Cloudy Mirror

looking for mirrors
we fall in love with that which reflects us
back to ourselves most beautifully

enraptured with our uniqueness
we become entangled

Japan is like that

in the exoticism & sweetness
of loving a mystery
we play at magic
we see ourselves as honored outsiders in the floating world
glorious intruders, glimmering explorers

so of course it's a tedious thing
to remove the webbing, a filament at a time
place the shining fibres aside
look into the mirror

squint hard to see ourselves
from another angle
in another light

maru kaite

cycling through
the turnabout and
back up the path
I took when I first
arrived

bizan
beautiful mountain

to the shrine I built
on the wooded corner
to the wooded god

the green sounds
crinkling overhead
the sky warped and blue
a jet-lag day

I built the shrine
where a shrine once stood
I built the shrine
from rocks I found

on the path
on my way up

maru kaite
draw a circle

warped and wrapped
back to the past
to the ground where I began
the ground where I decide on the ending

green tender shoots
of some Japanese wonder
pushing up and through

an early spring
an early ending
an early beginning

learn to say yes

haven't found anything
that works better than anything else

came with an ugly smile
encrusted with winter

wake up younger
learn to say yes

Greener

there's no grass to be seen back home
for all the snow this year so
I can't rightfully imagine that it could be any greener

but the simple things like snow at home and
woodsmoke on the wind
and the lakes frozen for the first time in years
glassy smooth for ice-skating

all the winter on the other side of the world
forces a spring in my heart

pushing forth a greening bursting yearning
the tendrils of longing that grow so vigourously
they choke the host

I do not have the words

lusciousness and lasciviousness
hand and hand and hand in the land
of rolling muddled R's and L's
tethered together and sliding past
into the incomprehensible

(and he doesn't even know I'm writing poems about him
and he will never know that I have written poems about him)

sliding past into the meaningless abyss of exquisite sensibilities
sensitivities divined by their squirrelley senility
riding this riding this riding this
wave of imperfection with a determination heretofore
unknown in this swimming cavity inside my brimming chest
I am bursting with recognition, requisitions

I say all of this
yet I do not have the words

Bakayaro!

when might you stop sending me flowers
long enough to realize
that flowers
won't
cut
it

landslide

let's make this metric and remind ourselves that given a centimetre, one might take a kilometre, and lead to an unequal and damaging kind of grab for the goodies so briefly displayed
and then demanded

as though one was never taught the basic principle of asking nicely and even if one did ask nicely,
there really was only a fraction of a fraction of a fraction there for the taking in the first place

she read the cards last night and was surprised to see that she might finally be able to not put up with what was put up with in the past and wondering if that means now or future, tenses not relevant until put into action, metric or imperial or otherwise, the kilometres have been claimed
and

one is not so sure of how to reclaim vast expanses of interior space only recently discovered, oh explorer with the land so fresh under her feet suddenly shifting away

ketai denwa

oh
I transmorgified into
one more button-pushing
instant-messaging
robot

at the train station
or the midnight shrine
with or without the friends at my side
on my bike, even
eyes cast up and back
up and back up and back

a signal beckons and I obey to say
little or nothing

oh
how long before I crash