Tune  

Here, the night chitters softly along the dark lagoon.

   In the distance, a woman’s voice cries an old

song, her Spanish frays into the ocean’s uneasy

   coming and going.  Under my breastbone a wistful

tune breaks   over and over.

Two thousand miles north, you sit at your window.

   Little coils of snow come and go

on the bare road.  You write that the tree you

   described last week as wearing

a golden dress late-lit down her side

   is memory now.

Here, the lagoon.  Its mystery, its deep.  Silent shape

   of a waiting catamaran

on its dark body.  The lagoon, its quiet breathing,

the streak on its surface where the

moon breaks   over and over.

Four Days before Christmas

Dusk rises from the ground outside my window, 
O Magnum Mysterium rises 
from the speakers on the high-shelved 
books of this room and the snow 
keeps coming, big buffeting gusts this afternoon, 
now the flakes falling 
vertical as a beanpole in a folk tale, 
hundreds of feathery snow poles stretching
from heaven to earth, and as dusk thickens 
into dark, I can just make out 
the dead, sliding down, sliding down, one after another. 
 
The dead I say.  My dead I mean.  Every year 
at this time, more of them. 
My parents and their kin, 
the country folk of East Wawanosh,
all that generation, 
their hands ingrained with toil, 
bodies ruled by the quickening green spears 
of transformation in spring, 
the dwindling every fall. 
Colleagues whose half-lived lives 
dangle behind like the severed tail of a kite, its body  
lost in high blue.  And last, 
after a long pause, and still in the coal-dark 
hoodie she wore to the train tracks, 
Stephanie.
                 My dead.  Invisible in the falling 
snow.  I can feel them out there; I know 
what they want.  They want
the rich dark sauce of Christmas 
on their tongues, they want to tell me 
what they’ve learned in their 
discarnate lives, they want in and I want 
them in, want to tell them how they go on 
changing, even in death.
                                    Longing arrows 
           from them to me and back again, almost 
cracks the cold pane.