Your name

Where is the name

By which I called you

Why does the forsythia

Lie heavy, in winter’s wake

As if yearning for

Its sleep

*

https://ottawacitizen.remembering.ca/obituary/michael-ip-1082083615

A spring too late

If I could step so lightly
I would go to you
Where the gods
Cross drifting leaves

*

https://ottawacitizen.remembering.ca/obituary/michael-ip-1082083615

To walk with

Think of how I could make you again

In roses’ roots and atoms’ rays

In salt, the colours un-fading

Back to what they were

In the wildest farthest of days

Step from your dead ivory seat

To the bedrock, wet and gleaming

And if you walk to me

One thousand worlds will lead

Arjuna’s arrows across the reef

Denser text

Give me not what lighter meaning

Would happily bestow; the locks and transitives

Lead us but one way superseding

The wheels and wings and charged crossings

The empty spaces easy wandering

And all that was our blood’s first beating

Before ink and logic’s anchor came to blows

–

The pages folding ever thinner

And yet their bounds redoubling, stronger

Their weight, a snarled infinity in lignin round

–

So give me not the free words flying

That are the means unbound and will undying

No false simplicity as it came before

But eat and speak as we are given

The parenthetical precise, as surely

As we read, and could no more go erring

Though sub-clauses might leave us spinning

Or the bee in blue-bright autumn fall to ground

–

– a poem indebted to the Income Tax Act

Sanctuary

What hold the lights,

What hold the sounds –

What silence scares me so

I ask nothing more than seeming

Mooring against the undertow

The land we knew

The land we forgot

Has never been and never will

And we carve ourselves poor crevices

Paste where glass once spilled

Only let me keep the stories

That can never be my own

The laughter of a dozen strangers

The comfort of a kingly home

What hold the light,

What hold the sounds

But a papery sanctuary

Against a sea long lost in changing

And the charts that sinking go

Violet I

Where the

Hours played shadows’

Games better than hollows

Ever made holes of

Of a heart or a tree

The sentinel stood tall

And let darkness make all

Our steps move us forward

Five hours apiece

I kept drawing away

The more I tried to stay

Walking beside you

In your sundial’s shade

And what you mouthed to me

An astrobleme’s mystery

Will forever compound me

By factors of three in

Longing and hate

Whilst

The sentinel

Sighed

Canorous and deep

Just before the daybreak

*

Adamantine Dreams

Morning Synesthesia

I woke up prematurely

In the most agreeable way

Three sweetly-laden platters

A black forest, a mousse, a cheesecake

And as I dressed for work

I still wanted to believe

Sadly, my empty stomach

Proved the cakes were just a dream

 

 

 

Sleepless

Dark the curtains when dark the night

‘Gainst shards of fire from moonside skies

Fear turning upon the flick of a light

The whisper of water

A child’s cries

Mostly Rhyming

I’m really excited to say that I have completed my first illustrated anthology, “Mostly Rhyming”. This is a collection of my poems interspersed with black and white digital sketches like the bunny in the boudoir above 🙂

The e-book is on Amazon in Kindle format –  and the Kindle app is free!

Gravekeepers

Champ and stamp and plough the way

No drifts may bury hallowed graves

Though flakes in doubled flurries fall

And moonlight casts its silent pall

We sweep and leap and claw away

To bare the shallow, stony graves

For one is yours, and yours entire

And one is mine, in flood and fire

And one is the grave of Aristo

Whom all have mourned but none have known

His are the softest falling snows

And his are the winds that cease to blow

But champ and stamp and clear the graves

And sing and croak the cold away

The moon spares naught for Aristo

Nor do the sparkling veils of snow

–

Elizabeth Cook, 2014