My Father, who means well, makes me lunch
A man who’s sandwiches could never be
trusted, who used the mossy breadends cause
thats how they did it on the farm but
I am the cry baby who rejects the
deadened bread, dark wilted lettuce spines
lettuce rinds, inedible, unclean
Perspiring, lovingly wrapped in cellophane
And now I’m old enough I must
so carefully control what’s
between my full, whole, mid-loaf slices,
Fret about gluten.
Jesus help me I’m so afraid of
invisible moulds and the taste of iron
in those glossy cylinders of upended campbells
tomato: quivering naked, vermillion in the pan,
like chilled organs they appeared hepatic
I’m sure the milk he adds is soured he
cannot be trusted, my father, but
forgive him he knows not what he does, I
know they didn't have much on the farm I
am spoiled like the milk, too sensitive, I
wilt, because I have become too hard to feed,
we didn't know what to do with this kind of love.

Saskatoon girls in their cleats coalesce
To hit hits and spit spits by the Legion Hall.
As custom, proceeding the evening’s last call
good-games are exchanged for high-fives abreast.
Scratching their bites they squint up to the blue,
towelling sweat from the backs of their necks,
they know Jesus is there to see them home.
He's in their lemon lime gatorade too,
He supervises all of the pickup trucks
Country on the dial and dust-dull chrome
In Canada’s rectangular mid-midwest,
defined and deformed by the moistureless squall
that carries the scent of the cereal sprawl
and it’s cinder-grit **** to the pink of the chest.

The body remembers, though it has been
four years since the summer you shattered your
knee but still limped out across the continent
to Boston to see him you idiot and
this is the fourth summer you've placed between
yourself and the last pin and the last *****
your body remembers, though in the
torturous lengthening of fused and toughened tissues
the bad leg is finally catching up,
and the scar with its ten numb inches of
puckered track has come to fade bone white
against your skin
but it’s still stored somewhere
in your sockets or cells and when you fall off your bike you still cry
Though you’re not really hurt your body remembers
So that when you’re confronted with their engagement photo
(you didn’t even know he was seeing anyone)
the darkened garden at the Plymouth Plantation
begins to bloom up around you before you can stop it
like a seizure or a vision, and you’re there again
trespassing after him through shadowy pines
and night-damp atlantic air
to where the white chairs encircle the altar.

seen from overhead
tributaries intertwine
seeping through the dust

tangerine rivers
honeyed, milky, candy bright
ooze abundantly

warmly encroaching
burdening the soil with their
sugary varnish

I'm getting along
without you verywell yes
I am except when

I moved,       and I found,
a dusty tennis ball of
the dogs under the

couch       that he forgot
accidentally. His dumb snout
is what I do miss,

it's not you, though I
could use a hand lifting the
old blue couch, true,

but other than that
I'm getting along without you
very well as I

catch in a damp rag
flakes of tawny onion husk.
     Fridge drawer corners

     full of our old crumbs.
I'll clear that skin away,
and just kid the moon.

one yellow leaf floats
in the blue tiled, sunlit pool
rippling the grid

Make your love unspeakably wild she told me
like the textures of your nakedness
in the dripping sun and blinding water
when its late, late august
before the first damp morning
when you can’t deny
that the real heat is gone from the night.
It's ok to be sentimental if
it keeps the buzz in your ears
in this nowish spot in time
when there’s less and less
to draw you out of your nest.
There’s every excuse for this dullness
after a quick seven years
the weight of it shows in your face
on your grandfather’s heavy brow.
You both wondered
why you sometimes felt like strangers in this place
and why the sweetness of brome
can send you reeling in the dusk.
Seven years gleaned of their mornings
like so many beans in a bright steel pan.
Arriving late and later still
I felt the dawns irredeemable chill
and in the bluest of October afternoons, she said,
may your love be unspeakably wild.