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On the Lilac Nod (with process footnote)

They say nicotine is harder to quit than heroin—well, tanka ain’t too damn easy either.

On the Lilac Nod

All day the June sun
wavers on the bowl of sky,
cooking up a scent
of lilacs the shared midnight
breezes shoot* into our veins.

*I knew, but it had escaped my conscious mind while writing this yesterday, that the genus name for the Lilac family is Syringa (“from the Greek syrinx, meaning a hollow tube or pipe”), which I’m sure is where the underlying image of shooting up came from. This is an example of why I say that most, almost all, of the process of artistic creation happens in the unconscious mind, and the conscious mind is only brought to bear to fine-tune.

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In Curious Convolution (poems from old notebooks, June 2008)

The lily ponds are in bloom now, so here’s an old poem that came from one.

In Curious Convolution

To be sentient is to awaken in deciduous content
among ferns of knowing unfurled
beneath certainty’s shattered blossoms.

It is to live in a garden overgrown
with cultivars of caution and abandon,
where the thin stems of prudence rise
among broadleaved discretion
over bulbs of white, aromatic desire,

a garden where hybrid forms
of vined chance and ivied intent climb,
cling in curious convolution,

where every throat is a muted chorus
of song sparrows hidden
in shadowed thickets of motion and meaning.

To be sentient is to live, constantly,
among coniferous reckonings
where volition is a rust-orange groundcover
spreading towards a dark pond
scattered with rose and cream petals
sewn loosely
with the dusty gold stamen of dreams.

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Mid-June Sonnet to a January Pigeon

Mid-June Sonnet to a January Pigeon

Summer, I expect none of your reds—
not even the sad, stern poppies
standing tall, thin-stemmed, austere,
in sterile, well-disciplined gardens,

nor the prolific roses whispering
come-hithers on the wind in their
tangled lascivious sprawl from
June to September—to ever be

as red as the insides of that crow’s
beak brightly open as it threw back
its head to swallow, or the insides
of the pigeon it had taken down in
a grey storm of feathers, feasted on
while blood faded to pink in the snow.

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But Neruda is Dead (salt air off the harbour)

Neruda

But Neruda is Dead (salt air off the harbour)

If I were Pablo Neruda
I suppose I’d compare
this salt air off the harbour

in the night to the scent
of your breasts sweating
above me in the moonlight

and the sweat to the dew in
the grass of the headlands we
move on among pale wild roses

and their bristling stems all
in tangles to the moments
we’ve knotted off from our lives, from
our lovers. But Neruda is dead.
And it’s the tide coming in.

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Spring, A Reprise (and a short process note)

You can call this an experiment, a last-ditch, so to speak, attempt to marry tanka and cinqain stanzas into a longer poem by alternating them in a revisiting of the content of much of the short spring-themed calendrical pieces I pumped out over the last few months. It’s a a good-bye to spring, I guess, and likely to my torturings of the cinquain form as well—at least for now. Time to move on to some other form for a bit…though I’ve no idea which I’ll tackle. If anyone has any suggestions, I’ll consider them and pick one to explore and try to master.

Spring, A Reprise

Now that spring has splashed
out so prodigally these
colours—from the first
bright rush of red high up on
the slender tips of birches

in late
February
and the precocious spears
of crocus shooting up through snow
in March

and April to spread
purple, blue, and yellow like
bruises old and new
made by winter’s grasping hands
while pussy willows scavenge

ditches
for glints of ice
to trim the coats they sew
together from swathes of stolen
moonlight

through the rum-sweet scent
clinging to wind that nuzzles
all the faintly blushed
throats of magnolia blossoms
on their nights of white satin

in May,
the scent the wind
trails under and around
apple trees until their petals
burn red,

then grow pale, tremble
and fall as the languorous
lilacs open their
flowers, pink, white, and purple,
to the wind and its vagrant

whispers
of warmth waiting
later, later in June—
it must wander the ditches now
painting

each stalk of lupin
with the odds and ends of its
palette’s last scrapings,
but for the honey locust
nothing but these pale-green dregs

thinned with
a cat piss smell
leaking through sweet perfume
distilled from all of spring’s fallen
petals.

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The Moody Blues – Nights In White Satin