The little girl in a red jacket, skipping across
A pedestrian bridge made me smile today.
Her jacket was so red against the pure blue sky,
She seemed to be telling me something.
Spring was just a skip away, just a jump away,
And then she leapt into spring with joy,
And with a smile, I drove beyond winter at last.

A photo I can’t forget:
From the Globe and Mail,
A Muslim mother kneeling
Over her five dead children,
After the 1983 Turkish earthquake.

Grief has never been
Captured by an artist
Like the grief
This photographer
Found in her face.

The photo comes to mind
Whenever I need to feel grateful
For what I have not lost.

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.

My cousin Joe was a simple man,
But he was also a man of the earth,
Which meant he was deeper than most.
In the final weeks of my father’s agonizing death
From stomach cancer, Joe came to visit
To say his last goodbyes.
My father, after yet another seizure,
Was sleeping somewhere near his death.

How many seizures can you bear
Before you reach for those Dilaudids
Prescribed to your father,
To numb your own pain?
How many episodes can you endure
Before you wish for death to take him—
How many words can you cling to,
Before they all sound false.

Outside, Joe sat beside me,
Sensing I had reached my emotional end,
He said nothing at first,
But the silence felt like an answer.
Then, quietly, he spoke
About how he grows his potatoes
And why he has such a big yield.
How deep he dug his holes,
How he covered the root potatoes
In loose sand, not soil,
Giving them space to grow,
Waiting for the flowers to bloom and fall.
I clung to every word
Like it was some holy truth,
And in that quiet moment,
He placed his hand on my shoulder
And said, "Come on, let’s go back inside."

Doesn’t just happen when sleeping and dreaming.
What stirs the leaves when there’s no wind?
What stands up the tall grasses?
Why do seeds float in timelessness?
Why can light appear like shimmering water?
Why, when we are well,
do we almost disappear into joy,
And the body sometimes feels
Like it’s floating on a cushion of air?
But maybe everything is wind—
the light, the clouds, the earth itself,
rotating in its weightless orbit.
Ah, it’s change that’s weightless. Problem solved.

One time my father was getting hassled
by some wiseguy from Detroit,
but all dad had to do was make a phone call,
and the young, dumb wiseguy
was chastised for hassling an old friend.
And I still have that secret little phone book
of numbers—those numbers—even though all of them are dead.
Maybe if I have to, I can call them all in hell.

Sunlight on the outer
fringes of the clouds:
somewhere,
a table set for summer.

Why do I love Rachmaninoff’s Vocalise so much?
What has happened to me,
Overnight I’ve become an old man who weeps
For a song without words.
Is it because I’ve known the past,
Or because I know the future—
And that is a bitter knowledge to possess,
To know we will ****** each other again,
And that nothing changes
Across landscapes of madness.
Another Vocalise will have to be written,
And another me will have to suffer
The sadness of knowing,
Of hating who we are,
And of what we’re capable—
After all, there’s something tragic about music
If it exists to heal the wounds
That we ourselves inflict.

Touch the surface
Touch the light
Touch my skin
Touch my eyes
With your eyes
Touch the surface
Touch the pond
Feel the ripples
Hold the gold
Let us love
The same light together

may depress,
but I see it as the tree of winter
shedding its last leaves.

If it’s cold,
it’s only because winter
has paused over us,
resting without a coat.

If it’s grey,
it’s only because winter
hasn’t slept in days—
his face gone ashen.

Intellectually,
I’m indifferent to vicissitudes,
but my body feels the changes—
my body is the weak point.

I compensate—
growing leaves and poems
on my limbs,
that the spirit might carry
into Spring
what the body can’t.

I went to the other side
And saw one I loved
She lowered her head when I called
I saw my mother and father
Standing in the mist
Their faces pale and soft
Tell me it is you mother
Tell me it is you father
And amid the multitudes
I saw my brother
In all his sadness
Searching for his son
And I heard my father
Ask a question in my mind
What have you become
What have you become
And then I woke
To face what remains of me now

Did anyone else see it today?
Gallons of goldfinches
Poured out of the clouds,
Like gold coins were falling,
Like the wings of the sun
Were coming undone.
Some flocked, and others scattered,
Singing and flying
Like improvised jazz,
Like the music of joy,
Like playthings of peace—
Heard and seen,
But just out of reach.

Tell me where Jimmy Hoffa is.
Long as I can remember,
he’s been buried in my psyche.
Long as I can recall,
he’s been hidden in my memory.
America, I don’t recognize you.
All your money belongs to the rich,
and decent folk are a thing of the past.
Is Jimmy Hoffa in the air or the earth?
Was he incinerated,
scattered everywhere and nowhere
both at once and neither?
Is he buried under a building or freeway?
Perhaps at the bottom of a lake?
Crushed in some wrecking yard?
All the stories are true.
All the stories are false.
All the people talking are liars.
All the liars are telling the truth.

It’s too bad Ruth closed her fruit stand.
She’d sell fresh produce from the county
On a little piece of land she owned.
Ruth had an earth grain to her skin
Like bushels of greens, baskets of pears.
She loved to smile and talk,
Her heart as pure as sunlight on soil.
She had the wisdom of nature
And grit of work to her banter.
Now, when I drive past the stand,
It just looks abandoned, like Ruth
Had wandered into the wilderness,
And the blades of a standing fan
She left behind, turn without power,
Turn with the seasons, and haven’t stopped.

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.