Jan. 20, 2025

1 Year Anniversary of Her Funeral

Could you in this merciless night
remember with me the gathering,
the water, salt rituals, sweet tea
served in some woman’s fine china?

In this merciless night, could you
remember how we lay her down
to sleep one last time, one last fold
of blanket softer than imagined
one last year, one last life …

O grief, O grief
through you I swim
we swim in you
this merciless night.

Jan. 18,2025

Buying a Teapot Online

Twenty stores at least I tread, hunting for a fine teapot:
homestyle stores, tea shops, antique stores, even HBC
(its departments anorexic, starved of what used to be).

Something beautiful, elegant, sound,
I’m forced to trawl websites now.

I had a teapot once, it was lovely, but my ex’s
now-wife, lovely Miss 2.0, took all my good dishes,
my good Henkel knives, my sideboard,
the Art Deco clock … and what the hell,
what kind of woman eats off another woman’s plates any how?
Oh … wait, she bloodied my sheets too, I suddenly recall.

Who sells china anymore?
Antique shops turn it away at the door,
full sets of china shunned like old wives, wives
abandoned, wives wished dead,

all those precious plates, tureens, bowls that passed
across five generations: fin-de-siecle, war, flapper
Depression, another war, electricity, t.v. sets, astronaut era, internet!

China dragged out at Xmas, Sunday dinners …
all that gravy, all those mashed potatoes, all those cups of tea,
all that soaking, washing, and gossiping at the sink …

all those years cooking, cleaning,
keeping decades for him and not themselves
what a waste of good china, what fools to love china,

no wonder it’s all being thrown out.

Oct. 21, 2024

A few doodles written during AIR (St Andrews Wesley/Vanc) Brandon Wint’s first workshop on prayer and poetry. I haven’t sat in a workshop setting for years, maybe 17 years, the Banff Writers Studio, so this is gonna be interesting!

First prompt: What is prayer?

prayer

I walk with the dead

long for them, call them back

generation after generation

of ancestor faces fixed in black

and white photographs, little miracles.

At night, they slip through cracks

in my grandmother’s rolltop desk

where their images are kept,

their chatter, beautiful laughter

returning, seals my sleep at last.

Second prompt: a response to Bringing the Shovel Down by Ross Gay as read by Brandon Wint. I’ve never read Gay’s poetry before & this was def. a challenging albeit exquisite piece. Given the context of
the workshop I received the poem as a confession. The hard part of confessionals is that while they might help the confessor feel better, without absolution they may pass the trauma forward. This, then, might be an absolution?

Confession Upon Hearing Ross Gay’s ‘Bringing the Shovel Down’

I am going to steal the salt of this poem,
then the white birch,
and probably the starlings in sticker bushes.
100%, for sure, I want blue robin eggs…

Darling, for love I will
copy his light breaking over the fields,
yet, too, for you,

I shall forget every last detail
of his testimony, witness,

his brutal, bruising youth.