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