for Duke Ellington
Rephrase the rain
Reshape the pain
Rewind the key
Resolve the rage
Rewire the fire
Reword the words
Restructure truth
Rebody spirit
Rebuild oneness
Reflag freedom
Reload the love
Replenish light
Rephrase the rain
Reshape the pain
Rephrase the rain
The statues say bring us down,
We’ve long forgotten the flesh
For which we now are cast,
Our hearts exposed at last.
Rude history stands accused
As well it should.
Love has opened its eyes.
It tries to breathe
Through a crack in the pedestal.
One feather, two shadows.
Two feathers, four shadows.
Three feathers, eight shadows…
This is how earth was created,
How the earth separated from itself,
How the sky learned to float,
The sun learned to be many places,
How wings multiplied,
Clouds gathered and rain began to fall.
it only took a light breeze to waken the flowers they spread their wings and set off into the butterfly kingdom of the new creation so too the plants felt the breeze and began walking along the scorched ground in search of water and the fish also took it upon themselves to breathe air and move onto land opening roads closed for millions of years and for a time all seemed as it should be until it became clear from animals who ventured into the cities that the human population was disappearing so the higher primates and large-brained animals conferred in private to develop strategies for the disappearing humans and some animals who’d come to hate humans voted to let them die because they were no good from the start and others with more forgiving natures agreed that surely we must do everything we can to save this species as part of our global community and just as important as saving the punk-haired Mary river turtle or the yellow eyed Aye Aye lemur or the Chinese crocodile and yet conservative primates had their own agenda warning that the oversexed humans would too quickly recover and truly no one knew what to do about the humans who went extinct after consecutive pandemics and extended periods of civil unrest
I’ve seen the moon in windows
At life’s saddest hour
Like a transparent sphere
Left behind by the mists of change
I’ve seen moons in mirrors
With faces of ancestors
Buried in the illusion of time
Moons in photographs
Fall from the hands of mothers
Into abysses of blackest despair
I’ve seen the moon on ponds
Flow out without spilling its silver
And the moon in ocean waves
Fold distances into dreams
Returning lovers to their shores
I’ve seen mountaintop moonlight
Outlining each peak
In heaven’s own cold twilight
Moons over the desert
Like the sun of vast night
Begun in a grain of sand
I’ve seen canyons
Into which the moon dropped lures
For the fish of the deepest stars
But I have never seen the moon ablaze
Except in the eyes of men
Three hawk feathers in three weeks.
The gods are speaking to me again.
They have come down from the clouds
With these notices of flight.
Before the first, I felt bound to the earth.
After the second, I tested my wings.
With the third, I leave my body behind.
They are footprints of light
Laughing forests of stone
Savannahs of blown-glass animals
Migrations of palm prints
Oceans of raw materials
Deserts of innumerable alphabets
Mountain skies with mountains
They are footprints of light
Trees of first flight
Clouds and water flowers
Vines of healing outgrowth
Silence smiling in space
Rain enacting its own performance
They are footprints of light
The crabapple trees love drizzling rain.
Their jewels burst open and the street
Becomes awash in five-petalled fuchsia.
It brings out the painter and lover in me.
The dampness opens all my pores,
Tasting their waves of delicate rose.
Embraced by rain they’re never more content.
Even the oldest trees with branches
Like entwined limbs of exhausted lovers
Would, in their death throes
Flower for a thousand years– if they could.
Today I miss my friend, Venera. If you didn’t know her, you didn’t know the Spring. She was the Spring. If you never met Venera, you never met the best side of yourself, because that’s what she brought out of you. Today I miss my friend, Venera. If you didn’t know her, you couldn’t know charm for its own sake. If you never met Venera, half the light of love is missing from the moon. And having known her, half the light of love is missing from the moon.
(Essex County)
By mixing the sunset
With green farms
And black walnut,
A white horse grazes in a field.
(Cape Breton)
By mingling lake water
With white birch
And yellow leaves,
The sail of the sun floats into view.
(PEI)
By combining lupins
With red soil and green fields
The island sleeps
In the waves of its dreams.
(Chocolate River, New Brunswick)
By amassing sediment
The sun pans for gold
Like an old prospector
Knee-deep in the river.
(Rural Ontario)
By bonding the smell of snow
With wood smoke,
November sets its essence
In your mind.
(Lake Louise, Alberta)
By joining elevation
To compression and water
Mountains wash their faces
In their own turquoise mirrors.
(Gaspe, Quebec)
By linking the St. Lawrence
To an endless watershed
Of blue iris in bloom
Beauty floods the seaway.
