_ March 18th to April 1st 1982

 

The Other Press

Page 7

 

ee

Conception

come into this mauve forest with me stay close
we'll have another kind of talk
little mother in a language of beaded twigs’
diamonds that hold change
over a mound of seamless moss
under a moon clearer than the sound of a bell
and a sun white as the hand of a child waving
from the departing, darkening window of a car
stay search these broken barrens with me
we'll weave a roof of underbrush
sleep one last time in scarlet blankets
before we return to the bruised city mother
without answers
before our talk becomes seemly and measured
as immutable towers of glass

Delta, B.C. Early Poem

‘(3 sun 68] I’ve been here 3 wks. now and my insomnia
is very bad. Walking last night I was struck by the

in about 7:30 this morning. still no sleep in sight!”’

Some things climb down into you tittering
along the lights and rigging of your sleep,
but they like muscle better than theatre,
walking, aimless horniness, hunger much more
than the hundred masks and voices in memory
that try to frighten you with a kiss,
laid on your pillow, from your own dead lips.
The Rhythm of the Fraser, ocean-craver ...
finally your stride catches in it and you walk.
(Dust-tops turn in a fretful breeze.)
Empty streets, stertorous trees, they feel good.
Windows here and there, yellow panes, azure
inside - you look up into them - a dog barking
these are attractive. The river, too,
has its attraction. The delta
is made up of concrete and pilings,
housing goes up, families begin.
Children try to stand on the sedentary much
the Fraser leaves behind, to see
only its back in the ocean's door, to inherit
nothing of the spirit of its course. Something
else is abandoned in neighbourhoods like this,
something I can almost feel in the hollow
the breezes partly fill, the emptiness dreams
leave behind in places your legs must walk.

At the first, vacant light I could return,

walking slowly, more visible to the windows
becoming blue from the outside, and the hunger
that tricked me out turned its face up to me.

I was looking at myself as a child.

 

intense realness of colours under street lights. Got

Yukon Poems

Yukon Lake Water
The trout leaped, mouth fly-snapping
from this surface, a half-second stopped
poised like a fish, and dropped

weight slipping below cold water’
and the august cold
banged in around him

strangling his testicles, for he is a man
a trout-man, but the coldness around him
layered green lake water

icy depth and the sunlight seen
puddling from below

_ Struck in deep, a stab of voltage

sending dream through his blood and his bones and his
need so long unremembered that allowed
only these words of hollow chrome:

 

Poems by Alex Kazuk

 

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