Poems
for
Voices
Alexander Kizuk
The Canadian poet Alexander Kazuk (né Kizuk) was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, in 1949. He grew up in Vancouver and the lower mainland, British Columbia. He studied in Nanaimo, Vancouver Island, Edmonton, Alberta, and Toronto, before settling down in southern Alberta. He taught the Western Canon and Creative Writing from 1990 to 2020. Some of his poems have been published in millions of miles, Microphones, A Town in the Mountains, Walking Into the Mandala, and The Bird in the Cage of Bone. The poems collected here were written in response to emergent voices heard in his Creative Writing classes.
These poems were written between 1990 and 2014. Some of the poems have appeared in Bywords Quarterly Journal (8, 2). and The Prairie Journal (66). This edition of the collection was first prepared in 2014. It was published on my website on November 5, 2021. Copyright @ Alexander Kizuk.
Annie
Alias: Toby Rudaski
Date: Oct. 2, 1992
In one photograph she stood awkward in her clothes, grasping leashy things; leaves, twigs tossed. Next to the album, ashes, cold beer and pencils, that hollow prairie night— passed out cold. Take off her glasses, fold; no specs in that snap… beheld, and pleased. A sail’s flutter, for sailors. Thank you, God, for twist-tops, Derrida, and dawn’s fretful cosmetics! Where’s the damn door. Under one fender the full flow of turns; then my avenue, like a tall wave, recedes. The fridge: breakfast another beer. Another islanded night. Not Nausicaa then. I’d welcome her though. I could use a friend. Such is the life of scholars, awkward in our towns; ashes and pencils and blinks cohering yet borne on.
All Is Ready
Alias: Linda Christiansen
Date: March 2, 1999
see the white table-cloth
all clean
pure in the kitchen light
all this way and that (from here to ago
from here to ever-ever)
stretching
see this one infinitesimal stand
spearing a boy’s soul
is a man’s soul
is a being come into
see each man a strand
all men one lacy segment
all men’s souls fuse here into one
fuse here on this old table
my mother’s kitchen
call this lace-cloth rhea
call her wolf-bitch
of romulus and remus and the parts
of this verse
call her kali
or call this fine white cloth
the holy ghost
who was it said
all the hours of men’s lives
are only but seconds in school
see one life-time a dewdrop from one pine-needle
unavoidable test thing
wanting waiting taking
all is ready to go forward
Forshan
Alias: Xue Lee
Date: Jan. 1, 2000
100 miles west the white mountains wait for my father who leaves for hong kong in 2 hours the airport orderly and calm after thrusting southeast through construction zones… his business, family issues, his weary, creviced face. airport travelers are so distracted, affection’s ragged like old clothes. when a father goes away for a long time the child holds still like traffic at a light or like sun or moon when clouds part, and in a moment his plane will angle up like inverted rain…
The Swimming Girl
Alias: Yves Jaunvier
Date: July 3, 2000
Quick knee-spring and splash of form: Fussed foam wrestles with the cold green Diver dazzled by violet sun-sparks. The caretaker hollers from the wharf His mucus-filled eyes glinting White wings fluttering on his sunburned pate… The swimmer strokes back to the sand, The old man waiting for a rerun. And the young woman recreates bubble daisies And round vowels diphthonging Significant ripples widening under a rock. The old man has forgotten or never knew About the snakish boughs of a drowned willow The diver, air, color, in silence must evade
Entrez Donc
Alias: Reilley Merrick
Date: Oct. 2 2000
Je suis seul et vous ne me derangez pas I am tired I can give you no rebuff I give you your much desired hold over me no longer to pretend no fear of you But come in then beholden and let me feel the symmetry that starts at your feet and columns No Then take a chair We will just sit letting the quiet here sculpt presence The two of us This little room Must you But now you are here Don’t go Tomorrow yes of course tomorrow
He Would Say — for Al Purdy
Alias: Helen Trevelyn
Date: Nov. 4, 2000
He would say boys disappeared in that lake under boughs, after dark, like vapor that unfurls. He would say it is so silent you can hear mouse bones going click because of owls. Some have looked into it. They speak of ‘moon-grins’ and ‘pine-speared ripples’ that go on and on. A heavy man lives thereabouts — the neighbours hear him in summer crunching undergrowth. They tell their children, ‘No swimming in that lake.’ Though young girls do, in defiance of parents, go there after dark. It is most dangerous, he would say, when there is wind for young men to follow a girl in that bush. Hell go mad — from the wind — or so he’d say.
Āma kē pattōṁ kē tahata
Alias: Ghumikar Sikander
Date: April 4, 2001
Under mango leaves
nightlong, fucking and fucking,
dawn claps on the lake:
two languorous and at ease.
Doing it weaves
swastikas plucking sauvastikas
four hill-tops to make
lips hands limbs eyes, keys.
How it grieves
me now, shucking and shucking
yet still centre, to take
cupped hands from knees.
Bōra bōra heaves
skyward, mucking mucking mucking
phallologogo’s stake:
deliverance as rootless as a breeze.
Orgasmus Organismus
Alias: Jessie Kruger
Date: Oct. 2, 2001
1. Girlfriend, your mouth is not like a tall glass of scotch because your tongue is clear, wheat-borne, and a 1000 proof. 2. Girlfriend, your hands are not a herd of famished tigers because your fingertips are light blue like the sky I am gliding in. 3. Girlfriend, your braids are not like the rigging of a howling ghost-ship because they are satin sashes in our own Cirque Du Soleil. 4. Girlfriend, your long body is not a warm river in which I swim because it is a window that I open to let the day smile upon me. 5. Girlfriend, your arms are not like the limbs of a eucalyptus tree because with my arms they are spokes in a wheel without time. 6. Girlfriend, your cunt a flesh-flower of heat is not because its beard is the face of another lover’s whimsical grin. 7. Girlfriend, your thighs are not dolphins leaping in depths of green because they are thunderheads laced with lightening. 8. Girlfriend, your voice is not moan nor shriek, because it is a school of tropical fish ballooning in the face of the enemy. 9. Girlfriend, your kisses are not monsoons off of Bengal Bay because they are well shafts stricken against my bedrock. 10. Girlfriend, our oceans are not swung in tides of lust because they are the fond orbits of distant galaxies. 11. Yes, no, Daughter of the Lords of Truth, your eyes are not twin cornucopias of flesh and fruit because they are ribbons and bows of every present ever gifted to an undeserving girl, a-men.
An Old Woman At Ground Zero
Alias: Anne Story
Date: Nov. 1, 2001
Your hands are empty, your shopping friends gone...
The last five minutes amnesiac as warm milk.
An old woman teetering sidesteps up to you
Holding her fist out in front of her.
The hand is inside a knotty red mitten knit of blood
Down the street there is dust like the maw of a beast.
In your throat and jaw nerve-knots scramble a signal
Across half your face but the scream is silent...
You like her. The cart she is still wrestling through debris
Is her Anchises with a stuttering, cross-eyed wheel.
With no history, silent, shrouded,
the old woman reprehends the city’s nerve,
Appalled now, riven with first responders...
Uh-mam? Your hand?—your me-too words fill in
the space between two margins
(two kinds of pain) like an art form mumbled in a coma
Above you in the light, people become already ghosts
bereft of scream...
befallen
into chaos...
Unified Theory
Alias: Tetkamo Thu
Date: Nov. 1 2001
The one thing I missed least after I moved into Residence at University was the chicken coop. Actually more of a small factory than a coop. And the thoughts in parentheses all day of you in your tall house on the hill and the Rockies at your feet like sea-foam Radio signals and digital calculations and then a voice and I am mist that cleaves backward against the water-fall and I ask you to pick me up at 5:30-ish.
Musings
Alias: Reilly Merrick
Date: Nov. 1, 2001
To have never kissed you bothers me tonight. As I write this sentence down with slow pen, My lips borrowing on this credit: To have never kissed you. As I write this sentence down with a broad nib, Deep forest inhalation outside my window: To have never kissed you. What chasms breezes wend in that dark! Deep forest gasp beyond high window These India syllables seriffed together a check Against what chasms the breezes traverse in the dark Accidentally, warm and cool exchanges. These India syllables seriffed together a check, A stubborn lack, a wish almost Accidental, warm and cool exchanges Across apartment windowsill. A stubborn lack, a wish almost a terror, For how should I be the best lover for you? Across apartment windowsill, I lay down my head on my arms. How should I become the right lover for you? Tonight you are here and you are not here. Are you asleep, your head on your arms? Window, desk, writing, breezes. Tonight you are here and you are not here, My lips borrowing on this credit: That here you are, and yet not, As down I write this line again with slow pen.
Plane Tree on the Amol-Tehran Highway
Alias: Iskender Balkiz
Date: July 2, 2002
Ululating `Ya Ali! Ya Ali!,’ mountain men scrambled from the bus to pull some young prince from his Mercedes which was balanced in the branches of a plane tree ninety feet above the bottom of a switchback. It wouldn’t do to be seen wanting to help. We Turks are different, advertisements of need; from Tabriz to Rasht, Chalus and Amol, we know Persians expect admiration, like Sicilians. The men are leaping into the tree. In their dusty, black suits they look like ravens, and the prince is furious. When the Hellespont disobeyed Xerxes and ruined his pontoons with a storm, he whipped it. That was then. Today, it is the asphalt that’s in trouble. But it will be a while yet before the men devise a way to levitate the prince back onto the road. The air is drier on this side of the Elburz, Hyrcanian jungle, beech and oak give way to steppe. No deer on the slopes. This is Tehran, the Warm Province. Once past the snows of Damavend (a dead volcano that dreams fitfully in the Aryans’ legends), we will see the city English gentlemen have loved since Cromwell’s time: for its kings, its orchards and the beauty of its women. Always a good place for leaders to meet, Soviet, American, and British generals, met there in 1943. A good time was had by all. But there are no generals in my family, and I have a plane to catch in the morning. Flying almost a full day— cooling my heals under 9/11 scrutiny no doubt—to Canada, where they say nobody cares about generals or mullahs or princes. The bus is empty except for me and a Yazidi woman wrapped head to toe in rags. Her eyes are amused; I’d like to see through those eyes, with their Satanic light, but all we have in common is the back of the bus. I remember as I write in my note book that Xerxes loved plane trees, at least until the Greeks wrecked his self-confidence and turned him into just another gangster-king, like the modern Shah. He once hung gold and necklaces and scarves in a plane tree and his soldiers had to carry him away, crazy with grief, to meet defeat. The men rig ropes from the tree to the luggage rack on the bus. The prince will join us, but the Mercedes will be a gift.
A Prayer to Mowlana Ali
Alias: Gulzhan Nizarabaye
Date: July 3, 2002
Slanting light over the stubble fields in Southern Alberta Sing Ali, Sing Zulfikar Coyotes dash over the hip of the coulee. The hammer, harvest-blunt sun, Spangs off the bottoms of beercans— And I imagine the gratitude this soil so unused To human settlement knows, O Ali, To see my father coming home After months of family business in the warlands Of his father, after drought and wind here In a tower of clean dust slanting back along the gravel road Just like a born-here redneck in our pickup truck.
Turtle Me, Turtle You
Alias: Toby Rudaski
Date: Nov. 2, 2002
On my left, twigs tick against the glass. On my right, door’s ajar. On paper, spent fountain. Thus are we always in between two margins: Repetition and what might have been more. I’m no wizard in starry hat, no cat’s shadow at the foot of your bed tonight. I am a turtle running for the sea at Sopot. You are charge the sands at Myrtle Beach. No words opened parenthesis in your wifely way. We are endnotes to each other`s analyses. There`s no air-line billet among your messages. And no whispers disturb his sleep.
The Canadian Response
Alias: Anne Story
Date: Dec. 1, 2002
America is falling
down falling down
falling down
hip hip hooray for canada
cnn we get some of those Palestinian sweets
over here
hip hip hooray for canada
how many dead falling
dead burning dead
terror dead
americans hip hip hooray for canada
Choices
Alias: Leon Moore
Date: Dec. 2, 2002
They are not looking at us, here, in the land of shadows. Their skin is clear and supple and their smiles are always canted to the light just so. We go about our business as if envy were not an auto-immune disease in the turquoise paint that is brushed in fine down to the points of the leaves made of artificial silk. Their fortunes rise and fall against the tides of audience-surf. Even under their lights, they do not see us. Should one of us come in between one of them and the source of his or her illumination, their lights are calibrated to adjust. It we stare into their eyes when they are most vulnerable, when they are looking in a mirror, they take Botox. Our histories are reflections from an uneven surface and not coherent. We create goods and truck mountains of ore and fuel, and we are servile behind our borrowed Sunday Best, and our greatest sin is that of self-righteousness, the sin of the anomalous. But in the land of shadows, people have no memory. St. Augustine preached in his land of brutal world renewal, that memory is a whittling down; shadows and the little knot of mores and shame are pared away. But where are, we cannot remember that time of the first hope, nor its pure hearth, nor the raw suety but by one man glimpsed at a time, and the justice of being that one who rode out in search of that calamity and not return, and the glory of the track left there for the boy. When they take a picture of the world, say from a satellite’s altitude; there’s the land of light, with rockets like votive candles to outer space, and there is the land of blood—you can tell because of the more regular explosions. Theirs is a land of blood-soaked earth, a decomposition loam lumpy six feet down with the bone-fragments of ancestors. In that land, the knowledge that the rigor of family ties can and be cut at any Gordian moment is a geometric problem stalwart was Euclid. There, in the land of blood, when any group of women congregates, they will default to ululation so shrill that the firmament slits as by a razor. And every boy dreams of gold hastily hidden by a wounded soldier. They will not see us, for our lands are formed by a backward tick in time. In a land of caves and shadows, we are like moving figures on imported German cuckoo clocks, rotating with a farcical industry—the charade only they will see, if at all, as little joke—and they we rotate back again into the fabricated dark of maya. John Locke propounded, smiling, in the land of his people, in “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding,” that a people may only think they are a people but under different circumstances can really be essentially another people. “Vulgar Notions suit vulgar Discourses.” Really? Under the circumstances then, what are we then, in our land of mirage, neither defiles of the chthonic profane, nor falling booster rockets of betrayed apotheosis? What, from there dark and lying mirrors will our people have to give those others when the dust settles, and the movie-set markets and the bombed out grave-yards are milling with desolated survivors and lucky, smiling entrepreneurs and Cheerful Little Robots made by the W. B. Yeats Company. What will be our vote when the nominations for samsara begin again? We are the people who have nothingness to offer. We are the people who stand and wait. We are the people whose iron visage metamorphosed into Marley's face on the door-knocker that freaked Ebenezer Scrooge.
The Novelist
Alias: Zoroaster Fuat
Date: March 1, 2003
Geese guard their particular ribs of mudflat. The sea sleeps. (Cold day greets nestlings.) The novelist pours body into chair; beaks dip… wing-shuffle… Always an eye, expanding. wide gleam shaky in gap — on sick shale. Light falls through dark, flaps full on wing — chevron. Gaze of the novelist’s wife, high. Mudflat blanches; her white arms held wide apart, descend, making bed.
Old Man Of My Plains
Alias: Anne Story
Date: May 6, 2003
That the Old Man meanders widely eastward Beneath ever high wind out of Montana Into the yellow coulees, past the big house Above the golf course, disturbs no one. A land at rest. The old poet of the town, And river, wind (Chinook, Old Man, called Belly Once, then changed to suit prissy Lethbridgers), In his window, calling made phrases down To metaphor the world. These cuts serpentine Translate his eyes! On both tall banks updraft Tongues the wind. Makes hair stand upright; Coldfires nose, ears, muscles, belly, skin. Plains’ darkness is never yet still, like the sea’s. Grandmotherly, the dry sun sets in peace.
No Commonality
Alias: Helen Trevelyn
Date: June 2, 2003
At 8:15 (Feb. 1. 2003): 90 miles over the Indian Ocean. Balletic, Columbia glides upside-down and backward and Pilot McCool fires twin orbital maneuvering systems and braking rockets. Husband: “Two minutes to entry interface.” Burns, yaws, banks, speed and descent in atmosphere. 8:40: above the Pacific Ocean, north of Hawaiian McCool: “That might be some plasma now.” Husband: “That’s some plasma.” First debris streaks aft; by the California-Nevada line, contrails luminesce catastrophic signatures in wounded arc’s plasma trail. 8:55: out of orbital darkness above Albuquerque, Mexico “And Columbia, Houston, we see your tire pressure…” Husband: “Copy…” Telescopes record structures aft burning. “Stable through the rolls. We have good trims. I don’t see anything out of the ordinary.” Sensor failures have “No commonality.” 08:59: Columbia is approaching Dallas, Texas. Craft uncommanded; orientation exhibits uncontrolled descent. Husband: no comm. An explosion like an orchid shedding petals. Fuselage intact. Then gone. Human creativity and will. Debris threads strewn 300 miles over Texas for Penelope’s distaff.
Qwertyuiopolis
Alias: Yong Chang
Date: July 4, 2003
Or Qwertyuiop-polis, it too is a rose, or frosty hedge-rows, when sky is clear blue. Note the highrisers of vowels, crowded subways, as your sentence howls by slim-legged girls (there always). Sulking S’s. provocavtive Z’s, languorous NNN’s and MMM’s, bourgeois A, and laboring B’s, queue up under your thumb. No sooner seen than boarded, though, as they retreat before spacing’s escheat to the misses you recorded. Sad. You’re alone. In fine, the annoying backspace button jolts, re-halting the line. How many girls wave? None. But you do — the kiss you blow become (in Qwertyuiop-polis) your own parole, and dumb.
CanLit TA
Alias: Loren Hiebert
Date: Sept. 3, 2003
I have always loved The story of K Walking out into the morning With a notebook and a pen-— Writing down greatness While sitting still All morning to A songbird. And I have loved The way its Flight is Inscribed Behind the beginning Of the story Of my people Not in a sound and a fury Signifying Ta panta But in a mountain and a valley Signifying Loss, finally—and a wish Ever to return But never knowing Whence. Next day There will be a test.
The Strongest Poet Of The Turkish Language Since Hikmet
Alias: Iskender Balkiz
Date: Nov. 1, 2003
Lives in an eyrie that is a place of darkness under any light. The walls are decorated with the wings of birds: kingfisher, cuckoo, osprey, partridge, hoopoe…. The boards of the floor are rough, unfinished like the fingers of your grandmother who is dying. Furnished with books. OED stands in beamy corners With Duden, Larousse: white, sea-bottom creatures. When he is not writing, he stands in his darkness, though it is not his darkness, stands looking out on the Bosphorus, Marmara. Years ago his shadows married everything this civilization could have been and was not. And European. And not. On the nights of those weddings, his gentle features turned to slag, the hair, now too long, to wisps, the eyes…. There were wives, children, friends—creditors, like the English company in town who owns the house. Everyone sees him. You have. When he is writing, it is as though a dark space opens through the floors of the house, like a cone, or a well shaft. But we’re safe. There has been no seismic interference. The wings are nasty but they don’t smell of modernism…
Above the River, Abbotsford B.C.
Alias: Tony Tranh
Date: August 4, 2004
Sated from its noon, the sun sprawls behind mountain fir cleaning its long teeth. Under east slopes, the Fraser River blows silt by ships of every description and log booms. A tug churns laboriously up river. Afternoon fans workers to their feet. Lougheed Highway rocks forward on its fringe of cottonwoods. Traffic frays at intersections. Word day. Lunch break. Chuang Tzu, Is it right, mass of withered bones, the body; shelf of slaked lime, the mind?
Drinking Alone Under a Street Light In September
Alias: Gwen Zhou
Date: Sept. 1, 2004
A little bottle of booze and the restless winds bothering the landscapesd tree on University Ave; a decision here and now not to cross the street, not to walk into the campus silent and unlit (they cycle the lamps to save money); more fallen leaves running down the street than cars or joggers; just me and my little bottle; my brothers and my sisters and al my cousins 1200 klicks away; I lift my into the Vib Gyor aurora and feel almost like the axle in a wheel, except that an axle is steely and I am soft. Soft node, rainbow circle,breathing night, ‘We Three.’ Hanging above the other side of the coulee, the moon like the face of someone’s grandmother. lined and russet from working her garden every day; Hey old woman, have a drink! She’s not interested but she’s smiling. The wind is running around in the poplar trees and the evergreens like a kid at a fair at night. Not such a bad time, and I only have a little time left before exams—for the moon and me and the wind, for us. Moon, wind, little bottle, wheeling rainbow, and me, we are dancing; old woman is slow, wheel is faster, wind is fastest. Little bottle sit this one out, just rest there on the curb. Goodbye moon, goodbye rainbow, goodbye booze, wind walk me home please. I am so happy to have such friends. Lucky friends, goodnight, it’s cloudy in my dreams.
A Girl’s Gift
Alias: Samnang Double Animal
Date: March 2, 2005
And there I shall lay my whole self by your knees & place my body carefully straight & in an adoring posture & then I shall lay my mind out as a meadow soft earth mat of grass a few autumn trees & I will let my eyes linger on your eyes awaiting plunder falling first singing to se-diev strings & then your kisses will cam flooding like mountain floods laughing deluge as I cradle you in your new river-bed
in a room with 400 poets*
Alias: Yong Chang
Date: June 4, 2005
heat in the foyer, clumsy, shoulders into its inner chamber, ventricles thrumming heavy with the voices of poets /in light an evening anxiety gravitating over woodwork dark learning magically how to bend from linear age /while bodies within a contraction of voices, immaterial as a listening stand lean hunker—elbows hands filament the flesh /and mouths moths charmed by allure of talk pulse languid on the light— /as words read out of manuscripts, plunging on the shale of voices make poems, swell-risen, foam through faltering PA /into auras dapper, public, scintillant in the touch of kind, anecdotes in the press drawn through private currents /under language bright of darkness as mica, as gilt—eyes of the old men that turn up slowly in cafes where small animals feed in hand /or loam what burrowing heart of a young man 3rd generation canadian needs dark of blaze beating in the air /so *League of Canadian Poets Conference
in a room with 400 poets*
Alias: Iskender Balkiz
Date: July 5, 2005
Those were bleak days
Always rain, warm gusts
Along the Bosporus
(But in the Great City
Only since school began)
Rain and bluster, both
Fallen tumbling
Heavy over pavement.
The bulvar street road never went further
Than the köşe (corner).
Mehmet’s car used to stick its headlights
Into the soup
And swing them around
Like a pair of hungry spoons.
They jarred the night sky
Not at all.
Thus had we defied
The termination of distance
Every Turk fears
(Bourgeois boys
Thirsty for Narcissus),
And sped to Club Arabesque
In Beyoğlu
(On busy Istiklal Caddesi).
And one time the wild one,
Tombik, would not come in.
We could not understand
Why he stayed in the car
(When the mirrored room
Lay within, so near,
Like gravity),
Boombox plugged in-
to the cigarette lighter,
Flying with 99 Luftballons
On Radio Berlin.
My Tree Man
Alias: Rebecca Kato
Date: July 7, 2005
After much proving mildness of this body my man rose from bed, gazed and glowed. Then he smiled. Monkey on a branch that flew above was my hand on his thigh. I stretched, wedded to one moment; jealous of a next. I was talk in a braided stream, my liquid hair a current while you held on— I was changing - another man’s cup to hag, rock, hollow, woman. He swayed in the gust of his own thought. His smile? Listen, through tossed hair, face tilted and dark, was a young moon. Most like a palm or a a fig his body was, Hovered roof, floor creaked, walls towered, after mildness of this our body much proven.
A Pettiness
Alias: Nicole Gniewek
Date: Sept. 5, 2005
When I woke up, it was past mid-day. My eye-blear rolled like some inverted sea-bottom creature over the ceiling and walls as I tipped myself, or at least my top half, out of the bed. With one hand on the floor, I managed to get my legs and ass moving. Then I stepped up from all-fours to three to bipedal motion. Misery of the toothbrush, nagging old woman of the hairbrush, the jeans, the top, the sneakers, the keys, the lock, the fucking arc-welder sunshine, a dead day.
Muffin shop blues, and a paper cup filled with coffee strong enough to fuel a jet fighter, I begin to wonder how many days have started this way, fucking dead. Maybe not that many, with the prairie sun torching through dried crust of little towns like this one, through tinted Tim Hortons windows probably made in China or Wisconsin or somewhere where people get up in the morning with water in their eyes instead of sand.
Ok, ritual completed, both backpack straps on one shoulder, I decide I shouldn’t complain. January’s not yet passed by and no snow yet, only dust and puddles of sun-blare all over the place. I think about Februarius, just days away, and the way a Roman King added it and January to a deficient calendar. That was when Homer wrote the epics and my grandfather’s countrymen the Scythians were driven into the civilized west to foam down like a wave in the sea of pre-history. Those Romans, always practical.
Some quiet thoughts comforting in the way they seem to add a little depth to the morning, but then all that shatters. Children playing on the steps of the plaza unstitch my mind. I think they have no right to be there, here: this is a place for students, god damn it, important people, future leaders, national treasures. Bounding up the steps, bouncing back down, their private sing-song voices clamorous. Their dirty fingers, messy clothes, scraggly hair taunting me as I flashed eyes and puffed a-toad!
Oh, their dun coloured jackets looked
as unlucky as the dust the breezes shook
off the fields a hundred kilometres around,
but still I passed, gibbering, brooked,
a dunce-cap of light appropriately crowned.
Work-history
Alias: Vidya Ananda
Date: Oct. 5, 2005
On my last day at the call centre, I worked late. Then caught my aeroplane and dreamed so many fitful hours over China, Hawaii, Vancouver… Like others in my family, one by one, corkscrewing down into a rough city called Calgary. And then they are there, a small crowd of relatives who have no history. The river that runs through this city is just a river. The air and the light are like bonds fraying and parting. We all know why we left India, we think. We all wear the same t-shirts as everybody else.
Runes Of an Epileptic Hermit
Alias: Yves Jaunvier
Date: Nov. 3, 2005
And I have gone so far, so Far as to the door, To see desire Ruined and not understandable By the hands of the hot armies. With war wound and bad disease I have lifeless lived alone In a shack I built from tears, Memories like seed-corn Spilled and scatted on the planks. The midnight horses clash, The white on darkness flash, And I Grow wild and frightful with the years Awhile alight storm-shadows flash.
On Woman: 10 Minute Spill
Alias: Bert Hutmacher
Date: Feb. 1, 2006
What is quiet about a woman is the way she stands there nor here balanced by her inner ear to seas long dry. But my reading raises a male mast for inward travel beneath her paper sail; taut ropes of other ink the rigging. Other fictions (like knots of place-names) to plot my course through far-flux unfolding from a loss and a keeping. What I shall know alters when I remember. Want tugs pages across the bay of all that’s lost under engine-sounds and bellowing horns and city-dazzles along the coast that close into one (care cuts into those hills) low light-lake blank as notebooks which can be settled with letters. What is quiet about woman’s a thing put by on mountains above sea where north-westers row English rain ashore. The pines have fallen windy words into streams that rush under plank bridges groaning from logging-rigs that crack open jake-brakes (like the rattle of good paper) that bray in memory through far-flux folded around a loss and a keeping. What I know now I could never have known then. These boy’s images: timbers I’d sorted on green-chains older in a mill-town across the straight, wood-chips clinging to mackinaw-wool, smells of sap and rain (care the pall of a slash-burn) and mill-sulphur press down a yellow dust at rest on those bin-letters. What is quiet about a woman is the way she breathes: a woe-moan dreaming, after-soughing ‘who? who?’ that begins ‘you’ recollected through the wind-sieves of grain and the western twang of inland, those protracted many-wheeled pipes of the irrigation-system (like movable degrees on maps); their whitening spray through a far-flux folded around a loss and a keeping. What I had known I’d not threshed before then those letters written in an empty kitchen and never mailed, coppery morning sun spilled across the table made of crates and the kitchen-door, harvested the seed (care the chaff of these words) her story planted highways before I could conceive such letters. What is quiet about her is the way she sleeps apart, never far from the mother’s house, though we possess. Her snow-words drift with winter wind till the male chinook wastes her still lines; my bus-stop hectic with quickening, pie-banded scarves (like the colors of boundaries) stream away through far-flux unfolding from a loss and a keeping. What I do know melts when I wake her. Desire blows words across the city and all its keeping where one who dreams in another bed than mine, ‘with one more secret in her head,’ is still withholding (care a blaze of neon-light) the far flowing drawn through bus-exhaust that roils upward in letters. Wind catches humming around the twigs of our letters here and there, an accidental symphony of present-past moments for our flowing care, in which we play songs touch by touch with the quiet and the still withholding we memorize with need-maps lit up unfolded over our netherworlds that hold Tintagels inverted, Hecatompylos towers, princely Bahamian flowers, all one-love’s lies, for what’s quiet about woman is what she has withheld.
Falling Water
Alias: Renata Dušek
Date: May 2, 2006
Overcast parting,
in wake
of sparrows
steering south,
cracks
into rain
along the horizon
of eastern monumenta
lethbridge city
across the coulee
Stalwart
and dusty within
being rain-proof
alien even
under rain
A great rain!
a deluge in
this desert town and
through broken cloud
then sun
collects in
the rain’s belly
safires firing in
unpremeditated air
green-gold haze
as the coulee slopes
and hillocks
flood
suddenly with green water
And here mind
cogged on the birds,
instead of math english bio
and my surprised sandals
discovering puddles
And then
there you go
glissade
beside me
your long hair
a bird’s wings
blown
by the wind
shining shaking
my raven lover
your shirt pulled out
over my head you
Unmindful of
that
unpleasant excitement
bone-felt
which clings
to textbooks
makeshift umbrellas
canted tilting
not working really
stinging from
value lost
A Community In the Backland
Alias: Susan Opekokew]
Date: Aug. 25, 2007
…after the annual festival of the parish, at which I made a show on my ways with children, my high school French, and chased a pig, we partied till daybreak out of our eyes a gray-and-yellow soul walks over and kicks the rumpled acres, the week-long, heavy clouds, and through the usual roughness there, turning, sinks a stone, utterly calm …groups of poplars, a few sleepy pines, stand in the folds some anglais glacier neglects …comfortable in old clothes, my gaze has the weight and indirection of a child …quiet as jack rabbits, my feet and hands listen we have finished hauling water up from Wesley Creek last-night’s beer and town girls call faintly now soft grains of til resting in our ears we think of a drive, a day in canoes …except for that call of missionaries and bootleggers these gentle hinterlands never made hero-talk by the stove, though on the Peace, Old Cree Rock did, one time, save an old man, but only by mistake …every mistake, for us, is a new start, like les Robenoirs, or the girls from the Provincial Park, laughing in the window, who drove up with Michel and slept in one bed. Yet we are so awkward the community cannot help but grow
When I Was A Boy the Element In the Oven Mystified Me
Alias: Tony Tranh
Date: Sept. 2, 2007
My home opened space, door-frames my place. Billowing sheers and old growth of table-legs. My coat with my pride an orange stripe on the sleeves. The sodden yard alive with delicate worms after rain. Grandmother’s Zhongqiu mooncakes more private than a dream.
good as gold
Alias: Cary Morning Eagle
Date: June 3, 2008
a dodge ram pickup hammers past;
and left two runners in gold dust
like smoke-plumes whistled by a dry land farmer
at ease in the lulled wind,
the late evening’s slanted rays
a shining angel in their eyes.
the river contains gold—not bullion,
but flecks young couples spend an afternoon
panning for with a beer cooler and
sandwiches—dogs and toddlers and bass,
if they are lucky—enough to fill
a fingernail or gild a freckle.
over dun dappled grasses—
fescue in uncultivated places—
head-smashed-in buffalo jump—
sun and soil like a yellow lamp
shade, lit and lighting,
effloresces the region’s aqua et ignis.
firewater, that secret the ancients
buried in poems and rituals,
we keep in place names like kip,
standoff, slideout, fort whoop-up,
cypress hills, where thirty blood
in 1873, well lit, were white-killed.
sky-fired clay, too, is like gold dust
and it makes sense to add it to my list
of flexions, burnt offerings,
good as gold,
which is better than the gold.
Damnation
Alias: Loren Hiebert
Date: Sept. 26, 2008
1.
This is a friendly message.
It is for you.
Words revolve, make a ring
In autumn streams.
In a day
Stitches in a coat.
In a moment
Can sing
Or snap shut and cause pain.
Or else, relying on revery
Between each word beat, tug
On a self 5 ways so much
Impulse vies advance through “I” and “you”:—
Requests direction to hear itself
Or hastes or falls or flees deafened.
(But we are always in between.)
2.
When the Father knew me 10 quick years
He showed the wings of His angels
In the bottoms of cups
and today
The Fallen was there as I drank.
His lake is in my belly
Himself an ant high flame there.
White crime
dances in my back bone.
3.
In sunlight the murder will occur.
Knife edge to His dark body
ni le souleveur, ni le pratiquant…
I cannot go home in my own footprints;
He cannot gurgle back into my cup.
He feeds my green eyes extravagantly
And prepares a meeting in the path.
4.
I am damned.
My apples no more roses.
Snow falls; my stomach aches
Red rock peaks out under the snow banks.
My name gone. I seek another
Crack, trumpet.
(Brass wild with light.)
I want my bed.
My legs climb with the force of gusts.
5.
From the hill’s top I can see
The valley, the town.
A scimitar sweeps through higher cloud.
The head is free.
I am a fire on the hill.
An Emigrant Poet Reads In His Grandfather’s Homeland For the First Time
Alias: Greg Mikhailov
Date: Oct. 6, 2008
The old relatives bundled up in the back of the room. Young Muskovite woman of sizzling vivacity. My pauses grew dormant as spoor The way cold sews a button here and there on the seed-sacks. With white hair settling under a dying patriarch’s head, And the tongue of the hanged man, and ice-wind Downing the wires that could carry a pardon; With being fed by silence Like a room full of roots pushing upward into the audience; In that utterance that comes home for a death Across an ocean and a landmass vast as Russia, I remembered That what drives everyday ritual slowly onward Also always draws back from something impenetrable The way Saskatchewan petroglyphs pull away from the rock. The sound of a breath scatters in the sound system, And the human face that smiles Like the grill of a farm tractor, And the swirling lamps of the surgical theatre The imagined bone of the jaw uncovered at last, Knowing only one language, Asking only for its silence and its skin. A plain of snow too deeply drifted to cross miles like that. Later, tea, vodka, cakes, and some male dancing. And America like a faded dream. And the poet who won’t understand Any other language but the one he spoke asleep or drunk.
The Letters for Abromov
Alias: Zeno Mandrivnik
Date: Dec. 4, 2008
Conference in Toronto, I listened studiously to Abromov talk about poetry and the travail that editors endure, though my own writing kept getting in the way, phrase-fragments, private symbols, doodles of active things crawling around one another like a ball of bright fishes I remembered from Mexico while snorkeling. Abromov. After so many years, itinerant, so much angst, trying to steady my life. Last night at the reading-and-book-launch. Now, pencilling the first turns of this poem on the back of that advertisement, the next morning, at this talk about editors in Canada. In the loud room, last night, told me he wanted out of the professor business, do other things. I was startled, having never thought of him as a professor. Yet I know I don’t recall him as publisher, or even an editor. When I knew him, he was my Galician teacher. My guide in the country of the poem. I remember receiving the letters for Abromov sent in error to my mailbox at school. He taught poetry. I knew the name. So there I was, standing in his door with the letters, feeling that we were like characters in a fiction. I was so diffident, so in need of conversation with men who had been there, here, poem-country. We had met before. At my regional college, he talked to freshman classes about his anthology (the first post-Russian collection to speak to us as craftsmen, not addled Cossacks), and later gave a reading and talked with us in the student pub. I criticized—too boldly—his short stories of Lviv. Now, bent-over in this wretched one-armed chair, remembering, another scene comes back to me, like a letter that had circulated a long time in the mails, a version of myself, not twenty, riding from forest to Kiev and the jazz clubs and the smart women and the busy streets, and to drink vodka and espresso, visit the bookstores. On that bus, a few seats up and on the left, a tall, greasy poet was scribbling in a notebook. Incroyable! Charivnyy! I introduced myself, as a poet, pencil and pad in my awkward boy’s hands, and I asked, “What kind of poetry do you write?” What he said was: “There is only one poem that we are all writing.” “Ves chas! Until the day my vmyrayemo, khlopchyk!” I try to make sense of scratches I can barely read— another letter almost gone astray. And I am happy, looking this over, today, because I feel that for all of us, and for me, there must always be someone like Abromov who travels with us in ruined country of the poem.
Morning After
Alias: Stefica Tomas
Date: March 3, 2009
Upwards flit the dews—pretty parakeets?—No!
On bare feet and legs, cold salt:
This morning’s million headed baby
Kicked from dormant tufts of beach grass.
I have risen to drift for miles, running
From the church that wed you and me, your body,
Those arches, that deep nave my altar stone,
Having known, mine yet stoutly stands.
How much have you taken, having given
Thought that fixity? Not this night will I
Be caught, draped in vines, chill, fishy,
Another ghost-ship nutating on your riptide.
No. The sun’s sulky beak parts. Hot cloud-steaks lock
In the back between the shoulders—lift.
Over on the headland turf, light’s liberty
Eats its Lenten progeny—in a haze, glistening.
I imagine my grandfather talking
Alias: Stefica Tomas
Date: August 2, 2009
Minutes suffering the time I put into them
suggest a black smudge on the horizon
that stretches itself out—then falls, banging
into desert station, reptilian
under steppe dust and the jagged sun.
No sense in your shell ear of those minutes,
no defiance in the moist corner of your mouth,
you, you, in your royal blue,
your little weight on my arm,
my fifty years whistling from the engine.
I have wept into her white hands for lack of money.
Yet we have saved small stake
from the capital that this hardpan ate
those pfennig of her father, kopeks of mine
extorted by these faceless siroccos.
She knows what thought engages with this place,
though I never speak. She knows the beams
of this platform were shipped out,
at crippling cost, from my dreams,
And that the clay calls to me like a bastard son.
We shall wash once we are aboard, my love.
You have wielded power over our clay
and have made me your wife, but we leave now
for the rainforests of the west, and those valleys
will expect from you a gentleness.
End
Alexander Kizuk 