a st. albert backyard -- october 24, 2010

it was the first snowfall and i made you come outside
you were in socked feet and a tee-shirt, didn't want to
but i stood just outside your door lit by the porch light
looking up at the sky and you just had to come outside
to kiss me for the first time this winter officially
while crystalline snowlight fell onto our faces.

what i can do

i cannot identify the pain behind my breastbone,
can't decide if it's physiological or if it's just my heart
hurting for things i cannot control,
but i can love you.  this i can do forever---
like letting the air in through the window
and breathing.  something so simple:
an involuntary biological reaction.
i will love you until i die, and even then
i won't stop.

another poem

the ways in which you changed my life
are staggering.  you don't know that
because you've gone, already.  you would know,
would have known, if you hadn't
died when i prayed so hard for you to live.

i can't stop writing about it.  it's been over
four years since you died, and here comes
another poem.  another string of words to bridge
the gap between me and you; that impassable void.
an incredible distance.

do you know how things have changed?
who i am?
will you ever?

building

did you imagine the exact sound
bees buzzing around a hive
like your dream of channels interrupted
by white noise & blur     conventions
so far into the future
only you could have known
only you could guess
at our collective distaste for the wide wild world
the novelty of bees wearing off
walls going up around us
always up
never down
it never stops
never
stops

three small breaths about love

1.

a book in bed
and the way you read it
a put-on voice
to make me laugh
like so many things
you do for that reason

2.

the mountains at night
and i rested on your shoulder
staring through the windshield
just dark shapes in the sky
and the needlessness
of saying words out loud

3.

a photograph of you and i
you're facing away
and i'm reaching out
and little did i know
you were gathering the nerve
to ask what you asked next

thankfulness

for the smell of leaves and the crack of the spine of a new book

fingers tracing across pages    a tactile diversion (& sight is many things)

for the welcome interposition of loveliness between ordinary things

and for my sometimes wanderings between aspen and pine

also for the way words wander from my intention and are changed

always changing    a living creature no one on earth can control

and also for the hooves of horses and the throats of birds    the sounds

which help in their simple design (& elegant instinct) to improve everything

and also    more than any of these    for the touch of another human being

a connection to leap across the void     a spark that gives us purpose.

a smooth stone

you went years and years on your own

thousands    perhaps    or even

forever

touched only by wind and salt or a brush of fur

a leathery pad    an animal passerby

but all of it wild    all of your encounters

feral and free and natural as the passing of time

until

a human hand reached out

saw you among many and chose you

you were held in the palm of a hand

how did it feel?  the first time    the first warmth

and beating pulse    wrapped around your smooth curves

a lifetime of coldness and wilderness

interrupted

would you rather have been returned to the sea

never to be touched by a human hand again

only to settle within an atlantic periphery?

or would you rather be kept

held warm in a pocket    uprooted

to some western landscape    foreign    and frightening

but altogether beautiful?

an eternity on your own

is that what you would have wanted?

displaced

maybe it was meant to let lie
in cool, damp atlantic recesses
loved by barnacles, pondered by crabs
looking up through a greengrey filter
of salt and spray or perhaps something darker
the broad underbelly of a whale