Canatara

(for Colleen)

Even with lethal Tree and indomitable leaf
  the woods
breathe in frost and breathe out
  warm sandy shores,
  a water's cresting scent

A forest is partly eye of the slender girl
  who flits the beaches,
teary heart of a lake enthroned
  in mud, slow settling—
  a forest of frost,

gleaming fruit & elk who maunder

  Given a halo
of mayflies & berry, half sun-glorying,
  half tree-glorying,
  a forest can shine

so far out into brush the bluejay
  lives inside it,
easily with the crow & the hawk cliff

  Acorns lie inside, too
  and the hatching nest

Roots and the mole with arcing back,
  receptive & low,
make a park of a forest, anywhere
  just as the shiny roe
  on all four elfin feet,

lives above all & after all in rain,
  lips berry-stained,
and skims Huron's warm steamy sands
  & looks like a lost girl
  sadly banished from the trails

Who is she?

With an elongate rather wet smile, she kisses like a slob!
  But she's a lady

who peeps through the clouds,in her strapless and shawl

  and brooks no lies

And to judge by skin tone and way she hates to face us,
 her oily palms up in prayer

  she's sometimes a St. Terese
The cheeks bulge with jack cheese when she says nothing

  & parsley sticks to her teeth

Shorelines grow eerie down the length of the beach

  when she is near
And stretched over the sands, she likes to follow in tides

  with her big seedy eye
& fuss around rocks and thistles til she's lost in a fog

 She blows out the stars, too

If she only had 'em, she'd probably stand with legs apart,

  looking imperious and cute,
like a wife with her wavy hair tied up in a bun

  Who is she?

Natural remedy

He came at my request, at last. And in reply to my, "What is it?"
  said grimly, taking a close look at me—

"Look, it's as if someone's stippled a sunset here, & mixed in ravens;
   stars don't shine but snarl and snake

The bass that bite lie dead with their gills open, washed ashore,
  and say, 'Take the spinners from my heart'

Jays crowd round jagged edges, or else go careering off by themselves:
  I see their crests through skeletal boughs

And in the tree's hempen-shade heartless soulless eyes of crab appear,
  or heartless bees under a heartless lily

The sun that tenderly and shyly eggs on shoots, somewhere somehow
  leaves a pale soil of roots, blackberries

And where there used to be ash-tree's calm is an oak's monstrous roots,
  spongy & scaly, without a drop of resin left"

Sweeping his hand over my back, a final time, he finally said,
  in reply to my "What can it be?"

"If it moves low in the night, sprouting oaks along lonely gravel roads,
  please, please see me at once."

Diagnosis

Like they'd done before,trees throw their darkness at him

  Sad with all those thoughts, & looking thin,
he twists inside so often he makes suns see disease in a bud
 
The dark, inconsolable ground of god hasn't crumbled either

The storm that's been promised and slowly freshens in his eyes,
  still does

And til he faces it like a fact, head erect, without even caring,
  he won't see the dawn,

or the circle of fields, white with frost, where the geese settle
  in clayey earth

or the road he's loved to run on, freely and wisely, with the wind
  as his shawl

or the sweep of another cloudless horizon, relieved of angry snow

And til a certain gloomy tree, dressed in grey, catches his eye
  and the geese don't just graze but rise over him,

green-breasted ones with cool elongate necks, wings taut to the sky,
 
and til he says, without once crying, that the bigger they grow,
 the smaller he feels,

he'll see himself object of mourning,again taken suddenly from us,
  sinking into some deep clayey prayer

Dean's vista

Since to him Kay's as terrible as she was meant to be

  or worse (god help me!)
—since regarded as such we both courted the kill—
  
   Dean, real or imagined
I say (I do even now), even after the rain showers
  I saw him  alone, on a bench

smoke in hand, lounging jauntily 'gainst the back
  staring at the road ahead,

& at the dry, surly form who ran by, me, just me—

  he & I locked in a vista
helpless, terrified, seeing nothing in each other since
  we were tethered to same ol' Kay

  Dear god! I was dying to say,
as paternally as I was able, without even stopping:

  'The dusk's leaden after-glow

is nothing compared to this itch to kill, eh!'
  Dean flicked his ash
feet splayed in spring turf, shirt open, sockless
  
  and gave me a look
as if to say 'Who's to kill his Kay can only one man be!'

  Dean, who's an angry boy

and slightly leaner and angrier than I will ever be,
  with ash at his feet
shirt rolled up to the sleeves, & itching to kill

  suddenly turned to stone,
stone of 'Dean's Vista', just where buntings sing at dawn
  & the turf lies wet below

The runner

(for Jerry Friesen)

Long as the slope feels right and a stride can bite

& a tail-wind's favourable,
with spring hostas & grass along the way(& love of sky
going dearly 'afore)

then I can run!—

& even as the thunderhead's
snarly fifes take over lakes
& the cars' brash ferocities, too, nose round me
at every mile,

still there's breath that means to go on

and the road ahead
(same long sun-loving one) —
spun of a breakthrough

will add to it, down the mazy path, a drama too
for gravelly shades and Lady,
accompanied by rain, wind; or moles in a winding ditch;
or leaf hoppers startled

to their knees; or teens, all teeth & gauche hate,
who wait for me,
a roving Aeneas, alone in the world, a warm body on legs
laughed at in spades

For the day's the same, howso'er it lisps with slopes,
and dandelion yards,
and a runner all eyes & ears for a dear blue sky,
who'll gladly turn home

when the tall winds die

The loneliness of my cat

If (and it's if and when) the master paw and its milky yarn
  breathtakingly drawn out to snare me, ever stops,

and by the star that closes over and  reveals its eye to anyone
  but the scared owner, says one day it must,

the cat who says (like a star!), that one day things will stiffen
  and I cannot follow him to the damp & dark

from which he comes, snatched from the needle bed and tree--
  then then I'll know the terrible mystery--

the deep grimoire of his heart and need to twitch before the run,
  the terrible solitude of these things

my whiny grimalkin with the slit-eye to see me to the other side,
  will tell me what being alone is really like