They are each and all still there
The moments we have lived
Toss them bright up in the air.
Like diamonds out of soil sieved

All exist like coins we've scattered
Time's the path between them taken
We keep the ones that we think mattered.
Memory-sounds like spare-change shaken

Uncertainty too in our exact position
Life's velocity with no certainty known
Entanglement tells naught of the mission
And futures sprout like crystals grown

And thus we dig as life goes on
And smash small things to find their meaning
Until we find our Higgs Boson
The pieces fall and scatter screaming.

Somewhere the path turned from forest, to brush, to tundra
Then to the breaching pink granite of yesterday.
The features are familiar and the scrub trees fill the same crevices
The glacial radicals, still sentinels that are always watching.

I can still gather together the sticks to light a fire
And it warms me against the northern chill air
The swell of rock is cold beneath me,
And my body is a poor reservoir from which to warm it.

Already the moon of November is here
Though the calendar hasn't yet announced it.
It comes unbidden with piercing icy tendrils through ancient trees
All silver and platinum and stainless steel.

An inky lake laps at the base of the granite whale's back
An intimacy born quietly over the millennia.
Of a petrified swelling-surface relaxing under the pressure,
Of jack-pine root fingers snaking through ancient seams.

Spent.
Rusted.
Encrusted.
Barnacled.
Manacled.
Chaffed.
Reddened.­
Arrested.
Transfixed.
Calmed.
Balmed.
Blamed.
Inflamed.
Infiltra­ted.
Intrigued.
Embarked.
Engaged.
Encompassed.
Decompressed.
Col­d-compressed.
Chilled.
Thrilled.
Spilled.
Spent.

I have been writing many poems
For a long, long time, I say.
Volume - surely that is why
I've earned such rank today.

Don't bother reading what I write
Save yourself some time
You know it must be very good
'Cuz it's a poem of mine.

And I've written them since back in school
Oh, such words I've strung together.
Many times upon the page
I described all KINDS of weather.

On special days, I wrote such words
The likes of which are rare
Seeing them would steal your breath
And put a sparkle in the air.

The myriad poems I've crafted now
Oh a dozen or two or three
Surely there are few by now
Who have written more than me.

For I am very nearly twenty two,
And oh, the things I've learned
Like people change as seasons do
Such accolades I've earned.

Someday when I am old and grey
Maybe thirty-one or fourty-five
I'll look fondly back upon these years
Though barely still alive.

The wealth that poetry will have wrought
Will those golden years make sunny
For surely there are markets wide
Where poets can earn money.

In a vacant and a pensive mood
Lonely and cloudlike in my wandering mind
No daffodils are to be seen,
Nor bays upon whose margins to tread.

Sitting in this café crude
Drinking beverages of the caffeinated kind
The world around feels mean
And the possibilities for the future dead

Projects call but beginnings elude
Progress is something I cannot find
The page before me sits there blank and clean
And only echoes ring inside my head.

Hello poetry, where have you been?
When as a child in a row of pastel desks
With stubby pencils and long paper sheets
Where we learned the paste from the scissors
You were there.

Loosely gathered into a discovery corps
We turned pages in tiny-finger worn books
And alternated voicing two or three lines.
With us who hoped the teacher would allot just one more
You were there.

When we waded through chest-deep angst
To spend hours tracing sidelong glances
Or the smoke-trails of our tiny flaming arrows gone astray.
Across chasms of the first decade of life in double-digits
You were there.

As we interwove whispers and fingers
Biases, peeves and favoured paths.
When we constructed habits and routines
Built of the fibres and sinews of our hopes and needs
You were there.

Hello poetry.
Like a ticket carried inside a woolen mitten,
Or words coalescing during a savoured conversation –
Sun-warmed pebbles discovered along the beach.
In our ears,
Our thoughts,
Our songs.

The potatoes to eat with our meat
Are waiting under my feet.
And so here I toil
In bad clay-filled soil
Hoping for something to eat.