a garden, a window desk—
all that I imagine from behind
the rented metal fence.
Better yet, my love can
compose sonatas next door,
a laundry line to pulley notes
across. Frida had a bridge,
Georgia had Ghost Ranch.
Virginia, you understand,
I dream of four walls.
A spinning top from one spring to the next.
Equinox, Easter, the calendar advances
a row of red X s, halts for circled
weddings, funerals, births.
Hopscotch between sticky notes:
laundry, cat litter, write vows.
Growing up, the chime of a grandfather clock
struck the hour. My father swore
it sped up as he got older.
Less time to do more. The pendulum’s O
swings back and forth, a constant pulse.
Looking for a way out of my busy life,
what if I started looking for a way in?
Doesn’t take much to reclaim a corner
from Slurpee cups and cigarette butts.
A shortcut transformed into a mini-park
with a bench, a few flowering shrubs,
a scraggly garden of cast-off
hostas, divided irises,
remnants welcome,
even the parts of myself
I cover up or reject.
Quick to anger, despair.
A friend’s letter reminds,
It is your darkness that gives
you your shine.
Ten years on Vancouver Island.
I couldn’t bear one more Garry oak cut
down for a Costco, one more mountainside
bulldozed into naked cul-de-sacs.
I returned to a city already ruined
and found people building
raised beds on boulevards,
growing roots, pushing back.
Penned on scrap cardboard:
Please don’t steal the plants.
Dawn’s metallic drum roll recalls
that single bed we once shared.
Blinds left open to watch the sky
turn scarlet, colour of closed eyes.
Waking to the roller-coaster flight
of woodpeckers. First kisses.
A pair of red-shafted flickers
lapping ants with sticky tongues.
Four, five hours rest, before my love rose
to sketch songs on the loaned Wurlitzer.
Now, we’re often too tired,
blackout curtains block street lights
but not sirens and foghorns.
When I lay my head on his chest,
prelude to sheet-stealing and sleep
positions a to z in our double bed,
it’s those woodpeckers I hear
inside his ribs, drumming.
Metal handle even with his shoulders, the boy
heaves forward. The goliath rears up
and chomps down,
ragged whitecaps of shorn and long grass
in its wake. The boy’s father shouts
instructions over the din. I wish I had
someone to tell me never mow
barefoot. Eat your vegetables.
Take the long view in marriage,
this argument won’t matter in ten years.
Watching the hand-off from father to son—
what will I pass on? Childless
by choice, who will I watch
from the window?
As his mother worries the glass
with a cloth, as the boy pushes
a swath into the future, bright yellow
dandelions flare
under the whirling blade.
Judged on curb appeal, which exterior fits
ours? On after-dinner walks pretend
we own: pick your favourite house on this block,
the white-shuttered cottage or shoe-worn
Edwardian porch. Through architectural tropes
we
