I’ll share this photograph of my parents with you.
It’s like an old wine overflowing time, still new.
They’re eighteen and twenty-four, in their best poor clothes,
Posing under an olive branch on a Roman road.
The picture is classically imbued; they, permeated
By natural light like actors in a neorealist film
Embraced in some final frame of desperate justice.
The photograph arrests the wind of the day, that moment,
Blowing blades of blurring grasses into living inertia,
Light pregnant even in the stones and shadows;
And there’s something more, something magical,
Beyond youth and beauty, a divinity being born,
Cupid bending the olive branch, the arrow flown.

When I did peyote,
I heard ceremonial drums,
impossible to place,
and chanting, low and rising.
Later, I told the shaman on the reserve
about the drums, the chanting,
and he said, "The spirits liked you,
that's why the earth was drumming,
that's why the spirits were singing."
That was nice to hear.
Better, I thought, to be liked by the spirits
than by what passes for humanity.

1
The rivers of the river were moving again.
The shattered ice glided
In one giant flow of crystal shards.
A concert, a symphony of treble sounds,
Frozen keys struck with light and music
Glittered all along the seaward shore.

2
Was it the beginning of time?
Or had the end of time begun?
The earth was locked in ice.
Darkness was upon the land.
When sunlight filtered
Through the poison gases
It struck the ice and multiplied.
The light passed through itself,
Melting and reforming,
Until the air had cleared.
Light took the shape of a fern
And ferns unfurled out of nothing.
Light moved and there was wind.
Light poured over its rim
And from ice water trickled.
When light was exhausted
The night was born.

3
Those who live by the river
Have heard the sound of light
In that staccato of shattered ice;
In the sharp tintinnabulous
Wavering myriad of chimes,
They have heard the cold
Remote music of a crystal age.

On peyote you cross the Devil’s Highway
to the mystical oasis of Quito Baquito,
where the roots of cottonwood, mistletoe, and tule
tug at the springs beneath a chemical desert.

Before the colours of night blaze like day,
you hear the drums of the sun’s rising—
spirit voices in the desert wind,
desert wind in the spirit’s voice.

Your senses dissolve into what they perceive.
Like the desert, you are everything around you.
Among saguaro, mesquite, and Joshua tree,
you are pierced by peyote’s plumed arrow.

Floating over puddles from last night’s rain,
May apples and trilliums carpet the woodlot,
Birdsong and light darting between branches,
This walk, endless as the light that follows me.

At the cemetery the light rain of tears.
Half the sky is cloudy, like my grief;
The other half is lit by the sun, like my hope.
I start my car and turn it toward the light.

Computer spiders spin electronic webs
Everything depends on the word “grid”
It’s a cyberattack the generals say
And others say it was planned from the start
Neurons flicker and go dark
We become space a black hole a dead planet
Lightning dies on the vine the current falters
In times past a power outage lost time and food
Now it’s your mind you lose
Your network of imaginary friends
Your memes and your mined minds
Nothing left to mimic or mentalize
Step out into the dark the coyotes are laughing
The bats have pinpointed our weakness
How long will we stay in the dark we cry
Why ask--  have we ever lived in the light