Be Mankan

I journey to Mali
this evening

on the opening plucks
of Toumani Diabate's kora
with the long-set sun
still brushing the sky

I loiter in Bamako

on streets made purely

of song

with people along them

like smiling notes
sounding as they're seen

With Toumani and now

Ali Farka Touré

who tells me that death's alright

just leave something behind

something good

like music, like this song
anything... 

'Be Mankan'

“It's the blessings that make the tears fall”

As it plays out

Toumani grins and ambles off

kora in tow

Ali fades with a master's chuckle

and a humble wave

into an eve of silence

The tears fall 

A Recovered Wreck

I rest now on the rocks 

I was stricken on

Anchored 

I've made them my home

The waves that harassed and upended me

massage me now in their foam

The water I once feared

courses through me

Willing 

its life through my seams

The lighthouse whose bulbs once betrayed me

now adorns my hull with its beams

I'm Home

Your grin belies

what’s to come

Your eyes are truer

But there are other clues

The open magazine

Bikinied airbrushed

impossible bodies

flashing deriding smiles

The almost drunk

       cracked

glass of last week’s red

we’d meant to throw out

My preemptive

I love you Beautiful

flops humiliatingly

somewhere between us

Like a failed acrobat

on echoless hard wood

I want to run

both to you and away

I’m home

The Spring Picker

I told him how sometimes

I can finish a poem in minutes

Like my mind and fingers

are bedeviled

and I like it when it’s done

And that I’m usually surprised

by what it’s about

and why I’ve written it

But how other times

It’s an ordeal

Forty or so words

that I can labour over

for days

Visits to a thesaurus

Struggles with alliteration

meter and the like

Travail and only to

hate it when it’s done

My father who’s a poet

my favorite said he feels

there’s always a poem

some place in a poet

Being forged in the subconscious

Like an underground river

Bubbling forming forking

conjoining

in the pitch dark

Threading its way to the surface

to the light

Somewhere sometime

for whatever reason

Let it flow

I liked that

Happy Hour

A burgeoning smile

The faintest crescent

of a waxing moon

Spared some sky

by just this once

forgiving clouds

It’s been a while

since you shone so

A sliver of spirit

An ephemeral lake

on Namib sands

Banked with beginnings

blanketed with colour

Shoots of idle ideas  

It’s been a while

since you blossomed so

On Your Leaving

Empty boat

on a vast expanse

of fairly troubled water

Insignificant

though distressing

should you be watching

which you aren't

A raw wind

whips translucent crests

and drowned autumnal leaves

over the gunwale

and a clanking oar is wrestled loose

Sinking fading

like a memory

The true flight

of a squadron of geese

juxtaposes lower swallows

blown awry by the gusts

above the boat that's keeled over

exposing a keenly crafted hull

just below the chop

Mrs. Xu

Star anise

bubbles

from the opaque depth

of the pot on the stove

Like an expanding universe

Wooden spoon

dancing

Taps out a zestful tempo

on the silver rim

it rests on

Mrs. Xu

chopping

Here she shows her love

Lost in meditative concern

amid the wisps of steam

A Room in Chungking

On the gritty wall

askew

in sultry disrepair,

hangs Hokusai’s Great Wave.

Almost a  window once perhaps,

this place has won it over

Below

On crumpled sheets,

she cradles him like a cello
having fed him a teaspoon of sin.

Pallid tenderness he weeps he knows.

She sees and lets him go.

On her way out

She passes

three wrong clocks

that tick out a tinny gallop.  

London, New York, Hong Kong

She sighs,

"London, New York, Hong Kong." 

The Piano Lesson

Through the ceiling,

above my lazy fan,
sounds vividly

the knocking foot pedal,

and less distinctly
the tightly knitted notes.

Chopin perhaps,

but what do I know?

Her fingers stumble

over a gnarly etude

into a terse silence.
A distant yet sharp scolding

rises and sinks.

My fan stirs the dank air.
Plaster peels above
like an unreachable itch.

The failed notes repeat perfectly,

through different hands
but the same feet.

The thudding pedal belies

the piano learner’s obedience   

On Losing a Lake

Most of the children said

that once the lake dries up

and a cracked bed remains

the thing they will miss most

will be the reflections

they are used to seeing in the water

Catherine said she couldn’t imagine the peaks and the sky

not being rooted in an inverted image of themselves

That it was awful to think of them rising from the mere ground

I prompted the class in the direction

of being concerned for our source of fresh water being gone

What will we wash in?

How will farmers cope?

What will we drink?

But on a recount of raised hands after my intervention

the disappearance of the ability of the reservoir to reflect

won hands down again  

After class at my desk their answer made me think

of death and of losing you my love

I don’t know why but it did

And the sense of it came rushing in like a flood