Books

Sample poems

I will 

Listen, I’ve decided:
life is too precious to ponder
the petty details any longer,
and to put it bluntly,
I will not participate.
I will not be coming
to the party.
I will not be returning
the call.
I will not be
anything to anyone.
I will stare at the grey sky
till it is blue.
I will walk in the green fields and smell the wildflowers.
I will imbibe this life the way
it was meant to be imbibed.
I will listen only to my body
and the black crows.
I will live by the true laws
of the Land.
I will pick wild blackberries
and pet cats.

I will write poems I share only with the wind.
I will raise a child
on the edge of nowhere.
I will nourish her with magic 

and honey.

I will teach her
the languages
of the fairies.
We will play in
the forest at twilight. 

We will hurl all 

hardship

downhill 

to the sea.

*************

We do not arrive

Life is a half-finished poem,
a puzzling run-in with an old boyfriend 

on Commercial Drive,
the same old argument
with my younger sister.

It is never done or solved.
It is never wrapped up in pretty paper 

and tied with a bow.

It is never accounted for, grieved over, 

or sealed in a slick brown envelope.

It is tangled and messy and underslept. 

It is in need of a good shave.

It is anything but 

what you think.

We are always saying
“life is like this,”
but what do we know?
After tens of thousands of years 

we are still wondering

who we are.

The truth – if there is one might be that
we don’t arrive in any one place, 

but many.
And there is no salvation beyond this one moment:
this slow, deep breath.

****************

Batsheva: on David

If my husband’s hands could tell tales,
they would be dripping with blood,
red like our sea by the same name,
and sleek like the innards of the men he’s slain. 

But David has a midwife’s hands,

refined like an artist’s or surgeon’s
and smart with a woman’s body,
as if he knows what it means to be female 

from the inside out.

“Fierce on the battlefield,
tender in the bedroom” is
a popular saying among generals’ wives 

and wishful thinking in most cases, 

but true in mine.

I am Batsheva,
daughter of Lisa, former wife of Uriah, 

whom David killed to bed me
– no secret in these parts,
but neither is a woman’s beauty
a measure of her heart.

People said
justice was served
when David took me.
I speak my mind,
and I don’t have
my husband’s silver tongue 

to coat hard truth
in soothing salve.

People say David has his lips
to the Lord’s ear,
and it’s true my husband
could talk a snake out of dinner. 

But frankly, I think

it’s a one-way line.
David bleeds like other men,
his heart raw like a gutted fish.
Poetry flows from his wounds
like syrup,
he weeps like a child over loss.
Jonathan, Amnon, Absalom:
his son’s betrayal pierced him like a meathook, 

took everything,
left only his writer’s voice
rasping out praises to an invisible God.

*************

Mrs. Fainer

In honour of your relationship,
Mrs. Fainer gifts you with a piece of 

crystal that has survived the war
along with her.
She carried it with her when she left the 

old country,
escaping the death camps.
As if a person could ever escape
the death camps.
You can feel the ghosts of her family
and friends
lingering in the old-style furnishings and 

paintings of her well-kept home.
If you focus hard enough,
you think you can smell the ashes
of Dachau and Auschwitz
in the living room air.
She told you once that
her husband had been a partisan,
fighting for freedom in
the green forests of Poland.
A numerical blue tattoo
decorates her arm
as she greets you with hugs and blessings.

“Is he Jewish?” she asks, with her melodic accent. 

“No,” you say, “but he loves me.”
You know she became an atheist
after the war.

She shrugs her shoulders.
“That’s all that matters, mamaleh,”
she says,
using the Yiddish term of endearment. 

“You should be happy.”
The crystal, she says, is so
you won’t forget her.
As if you could.
As if you could forget
your own birthright, or ignore
the urgent voices of
your ancestors
whispering in your ear.

**********

Armistice

There is a poem buried
beneath your resistance
to this moment.
I can see the tip of its shiny head 

every time you move

out of the way.
It is your reward for
showing up in this place 

despite all the rain.
It is an excerpt
from a conversation
you are having
with God.
You thought it needed
to come from you,
when all this time
what was really needed
was for it to come through you. 

Imagine:
a circumstance that values your 

surrender over your
call to arms.

**********

Penis envy

You think if you keep your hand moving
long enough
some brilliant thing will drip out of the end of your pen.

**********

I’ve been trying to read you this poem [no line breaks in this poem]

I’ve been trying to read you this poem for weeks. 

Each time, when I finally wrap my mouth 

around your cauliflower ear
prepared to dispense it,

you slide away
like a worm in a garden.
Some days, I just want to give it up. 

Take up painting,
learn how to play guitar,
follow my family’s advice and
work for the government.
But always, the poem finds me, 

tracing its way back
against all odds,
as a cat abandoned in a farmer’s field. 

And so, for weeks,
I’ve been trying to read you this poem, 

battling your reluctance
like a boxer’s heavy bag.
I thought it would be enough
simply to have written it,
but no.
The fact is,
I think I can find myself here, 

at the poem’s centre.
Yet, there’s a catch.
You need to listen;
like procreation or see-saw,
I can’t do this on my own.
You don’t have to like it, you
don’t even have to understand it.
I just need you to reach forward with the 

tentacles of your mind,

touch these words, 

and lead me home.

***********

Nobody’s fool

The body wants what it wants.

There is no use trying to fool it 

with alternatives or 

replacements.

Its own animal,
it reaches forward, 

grasping for truth with 

every mouthful.

**********

Scoliosis 

I am feeling scoliotic 

these days,
my serpentine spine 

a rebel child. 

Twenty-odd years

of clamp and rod,
and the obstinate thing
is breaking loose.
No matter what
the X-rays say,
I know
it is heading
for San Francisco,
for City Lights Books and
my favourite Haight-Ashbury café.
It longs to nap
in Golden Gate Park
with Steve Goldberg,
and dine on pizza and beer with that 

pre-med-school, motorcycle-riding alcoholic, 

– the one who got away.
Yup. My spine is
cutting loose and
there’s nothing

I or anyone
can do about it.
They said it would destroy me
if it weren’t “corrected,” 

secured with nuts and bolts
and shards of bone.
They said it would destroy me
when all it really wanted was
to free me,
make like a thumb
and hitchhike south.

**********

All the crazy boys

All the crazy boys know my name. 

They seek me out in crowds,
at subway stations.
They leave bouquets of wildflowers 

at my doorstep.
I don’t know why.
I guess they have a radar on
for girls like me.

The crazy boys find me

when I least expect it. 

Walking in the rain. 

Riding on the bus. 

Getting over
another crazy boy.
They woo me with their wildness: 

with their rebel minds,
their sexy smiles,
the sultry way in which
they don’t quite
make sense.

All the crazy boys

know my number.
They call me up past midnight

to tell me stories, 

thinking it is noon.

The crazy boys have histories
you would not want to guess at, 

and it does not surprise me to learn 

after a while
that they all come from the same place.

It seems the crazy boys are brothers 

from the same family.
They got the gene for dark-eyed, handsome 

madness, and Lord knows
they got a thing for me.