Christy’s Reviews > 1988: Selected poems and texts, nineteen seventy three-1988 > Status Update

With each circle and with each
divide I will too be there,
you will look over your shoulder;
and this too, we both know
will ache in the column
most clear and light.

spice scent of after-shave
Father wore. this room contracts.
a dime size, poem
I wrote for him, folded paper,
placed to his breast at
cremation.

Now, to write again
a new poem, freshly
singed, this smell
in air.

you come into the pines.

in the North,
you are coming into
the pines, now.

you are north
of North Bay, now
jack, red, to white pines,
it’s fun picking them out.

snow, granular
like sugar;
night receding across the lines
light, daylight and now
and you are coming into
the brittle snap

cold -

a descent

mouth open
the altitude and
rock face,
to the dark water,
mirror of stars.

'life is a short patter before
the mongolling of death,' a curious traffic of words across
accident-tending city streets, long breaths of literate
exhaltation

reducing of being
from tangled thought's
strands feeling, breath
and line a
memory of touch
stone cancel
'd breath
to

everything falls away
to the edge
nothing is repeated.

each moment,
/ a woman, finely-dressed,
work perhaps,
walks by

/ a pigeon floats past a blue
parked car

breathless, a centre

where words gather,
every clever perception
falls away:
the centre is breathless

like brilliant light
crescent moon
fills the pool,

heart, pure and clear
is a paradise land.

She is past and onward walking down her future, holding envelope and leather bag under arm, holding hesitations which linger in a storage of air.