Nothing is so still as a dead fawn.
Not even a stone can lie so still
Or draw all the light in the forest
To its own sad and resting self.
Infant of the woods, hooved angel,
Newborn of silence, spotted sister
Of death’s meadow, child of Artemis,
Now gentler than ever,
Now more attentive than the stars.
Storming the AGO
At the onset of the storm of the century
The museum doors opened
The windows shattered
All the portraits flew out to find their spirits
All the birds were blown in like wind
The landscapes came alive
Statues took up their weight and left
Saying frightful things as they passed
Much of the art was swept away
Lightning burned a tree of paint
Abstract art dematerialized
My impression of impressionism
Instantly blurred
The pop art survived like tattoos
But that wasn’t the whole picture
The rain fell through the open roof
Emily Carr’s forests grew even greener
Tom Thompson’s lakes flooded
Installation pieces floated about
It was really a pleasant disaster
A distraction from the seriousness of art
What to Do If You Find a Baby Bird in Your Yard
You stitch it to the wind
So that it will learn to fly without a mother
You hold it to your heart
So that you’ll know fragility forever
You weigh the infancy of time
In the palm of your hand
You stand there quizzically
Considering our contract with nature
You look for a nest
Only to discover space is home
You nurture the nestling
With an eye-dropper and a dream
You call a bird rehabilitator
Marry them and fly away
Close Enough to Know
Spring shadows at the cemetery,
two old men, both with walkers,
meeting on a green transcendental plane
quietly conversing
along a row of headstones and graves.
I had the strong impression
that spirits were talking,
that they were there all the time,
that I was close enough to know.
Pure Serene
Sunlight through the trees
A blue canvas
Birds crisscrossing
The day a “pure serene”
A colour Keats invented
The radiance
Of angels in the blue
And the sadness
With which they gaze upon us
Dream Therapy
When the dreamer is cut open
The surgeons are swallowed by the dream
The medium crossed over
And was devoured by ants
Acupuncture needles
Go through to where the dream fades
A masseuse became
A mannequin without hands
In the sleep laboratory
Centipedes infest computers
Neither therapy nor soporifics
Could cure him
He dreamt until the day he died
And then he could not tell
If he was dreaming or the world
Between Home and the Doctor
A strange distance for anyone,
driving between the lines
of being well or ill,
following traffic to the end.
Red lights are reprieves,
yellow goes both ways,
green condemns you to go,
stop signs lie to your face.
You drive on and wait.
May
May I have a cup of sunlight, please?
May I touch the flesh of summer?
Why have May flowers bloomed
only to hide in quiet gloom?
Where is Maia, the Roman goddess of May?
Today she is crueller than kind.
May I feel the warmth of the sun?
May I marry Maia to my miasma.
And once betrothed, may she appear
wearing white robes of the sun,
a bride of unbridled blossoming.
May I know you, May, at last.
A Violin in Vowels
A sound like green, seen, or sheen,
a rasping, straining and ringing—
also round like a flowering,
like glowing and fading.
Sometimes a note thins into a cry
when the bow barely holds the string
and makes the sound
of suffering sweeten.
Sometimes a note will vanish
like the bit of an it that was
and is no more.
Itzhak Perlman’s violin
between lost worlds,
singing sad thoughts without words,
like the open rose of the night,
calling Shoshana, Shulamite,
and I am the Song of Songs.
Song Flowers
for Patricia Janečková
At the funeral of the young soprano,
people said they had never seen flowers
so radiant, so alive.
They seemed almost to be singing—
and some of them were.
Salvatore Ala 