The Hills Are a Lie

Join me on this tour of the English Downs
where the Long Man is re-cut into sod,
more deeply than those pre-historic men
intended; intention the truth
easily cut into. Is this the first stencil
and so the only authority left? Forget hieroglyphs,
called down when the Rosetta Stone
turned falcons into argument.
The Long Man looks down,
a little white lying on green.

Seven horses carved on the South Downs Way.
One a gentleman thought too small
and far too hung. In 1850 he
wiped anatomy clean, made it bigger
in that big Victorian Way. He made truth.
And the story goes from there, commonly
out of the mouths of guides.
The one horse that speaks to you
and you and you.

Let's lie at night
in the hard-on at Cerne Abbas
chalk-drawn around us, those spade
made balls re-edged lovingly out of lawn,
caught between the legs of another walking
man. The fertility of you
wasted on the likes of me.

Let's lie between two rocks
and a hard place, well
on our way. Stepping in the trepidation of flesh
that will become myth.

How to Talk to a Brushcut Man

pretend you've never touched one before
ask if you can touch it
act as if nothing's happened
use metaphors
moleskin
billiard ball
velcro
ask if you can borrow his comb
ask if he's in mourning
say nothing
say it will grow back
ask for a lock to remember him by
rub him the wrong way
comment on the nap
comment on the nape
say he looks like someone famous
elvis in g.i. blues
oliver north
sinead o'connor
grace jones
whisper to him and feel it
wonder how it feels moving between your legs
ask what shape he leaves on his pillow
say how much you hated the beatles
check his profession
check his politics
don't mention his ears

Love of the Same

I dream my mother's mausoleum.
She will have no such thing.
But I dream it, walk with footfalls
echoing before each frame,
as in a film with sound gone wrong, a song
racing ahead without the singer.

So this is my mother's mausoleum, I think
in my dream, knowing how ridiculous.
The floor is slate, pink and grey, echoing
as I approach the white stone
sarcophagus cast in her shape. I know
this dream is a memory of England --
Canterbury Cathedral's stone bishops
dead around the nave, so many
with such a long history of dying.

My mother's sarcophagus, yet I don't remember
how the mask looked -- why the need?
I know her well. My dream understood.
I see only stone, smooth and white,
lifeless as memory. There is no fear in waking.
She lives still, at 73.

In life, my father struggled on a gurney
six days longer than expected. After aortic-valve
replacement he pulled at tubes catching his voice, wanted
to hear himself shout at my mother. He yanked
until nurses tied his hands to the metal catch we leaned against.

Fear grew, though he lived, pressed like
the pillow clutched against his chest--deep coughs
to clear his lungs, the pressure applied
kept his stitches from bursting.
Two years on, he can't look at the scar.

My mother wants no funeral. My father does.
This is where their opposition ends.
For in their aging they return to parents
long dead. This is no metaphor.

They have become immigrants that smile and wave
as if parting on a dock.
My father's plot -- purchased beside his mother,
father, in a town that ceased to exist
when the railroad pulled out. He will rest
on the incline above Byemoor.

A second plot my mother will never use.
She has an envelope in my files
with no secrets--she will be burned to ash
and sprinkled across her mother's grave in Medicine Hat.

Our days, so many, build memory into life.
That husband and wife count their days, as days go on,
back to blood and birth and love as a child --
not love of an other. Love of the same.

Mother, Father, I am the same, but never
made your break -- to make my own.
You are my lovers, as any
man with man knows. My fear grows.

And one day that dream, my mother's sarcophagus
a few steps away, the white stone
that will wake me
to a life so alone.

Oolachon Grease
Oolachon grease gold, you hear about it
how the Tsimshian empire held
the whole coast to ransom for it
brought the poor Stick Indians begging
from the interior, beating paths
between the mountains you could
follow in the dark, by nose
the "grease trails" that let the
whiteman in, later on -
a beautiful woman professor told me about it
paler than butter she said,
but like butter without salt
and not at all repugnant to
the European palate
used as a condiment
but I ask you, are empires
sustained by condiments?
It was their oil, for the flame
in the flesh and more
I found it finally
in Bella Bella 1992 price $120/gal.
and it smelled like the cracks
between the deck planks of an old fish barge
if you can imagine spreading that
on your bread -quite enough to hurl
the European palate toward the nearest
toilet bowl which is how far
Indian is from White how far
learning is from knowing how
far we are from this ragged place
we've taken from them, for that,
the smell that comes of fish waste
thrown aside and let go bad,
that is the old smell of the coast,
known, as scent is the final intimacy
known of lifelong mates

take that barge plank, let it toss
ten years on the tide, knock on every rock
from Flattery to Yakutat, bake another
ten in the sun, take it rounded like
an Inuit ivory and grey as bone
crack it open and sniff the darker core
and you will know
what Vancouver knew ducking through
his first Nootka door pole, the essence
the odour of their living here
and however far you are from loving that
is how far you are
from arriving

You Tell Me
The kind of mess my yard is
I have no solution for
weeds rampant amongst good stuff
hedges of salmonberry and buttercup
overhanging the twisting
puny rows of spinach
affording a local base of operations
for the multitudinous vermin
that defeat me, but I will
not root them out, no:
I will not make demands
upon myself which in the end
might prove discouraging.
I know me. I must be
coddled along, if I am to
even keep up watering
through the season.
Low expectations are the key
to any dealings with me.
The house will never get painted.
The boat motor will never get fixed.
My book will never come out.
I have adjusted to these
realities, for nothing is so pathetic
as the slob with ulcers.
The thing that still gets me though,
is this neighbour I have.
He has a yard in which no weed
survives beyond the germinative stage.
It is like the miniature
Swiss town at Disneyland.

He also runs the waterboard
limits out in spring and coho
every Saturday, administers
a sprawling business empire,
has a wife and family who love him
and yet when I drop over
for some BS and coffee
he is always available
and to listen to us
there seems no essential
difference between us.

Kinky
In half wakefulness you get a
glimpse of your life
passing through some trees.
It is important.
I get up in the night hoping
to see my life passing
over.

I used to get up at dawn
swim out to the island
sit naked on the rocks
watching the sun rise
hoping
to make myself different.
I hate not knowing
if it worked.

God on his haunches
such an appalling picture
God on his haunches
like a bird watcher, waiting
for what he knows must happen
but will for the world neither impede nor hurry on
waiting for the crunch of the beak through the egg
waiting for the infusion of blue through the bud
God the time-lapse photographer

such a terrifying picture
that the Timeless One should savour time
should know the necessity of every second
should want to plunge me
into the deeps of every moment
drown me in the glory of that which has been made
raise me, sodden, into uncreated light
gleaming in the sun like a dolphin's back

a barbed baptism, the eternal end
reached only through fiery lungfuls of time
every second clotting the nostrils
each moment a coal ablaze in the throat

For a Woman of Note
I have written before of this golden ghost
this bare-necked enchantress
of two worlds she was

now giving all to song and wine
to the sour haze of hashish
to flying
through the mist of moving silence
outside her window

now infant alone
in her girl's room
on the floor
sipping tea
near the journal of small poetry
and the oboe
on its thin, bent stand

is she still alone
in one room
lips pressed
dragging a brush through her broomstraw hair
in white immobile silence?