Beltway Poetry Quarterly

Medicine Ball

The neighbour’s children rake our yard leaves, then
play in the leaves after,
and their father comes after to rake and bundle
the leaves, after his children

have gone in. Novembers in New Brunswick.
Most buildings don’t move,
though some perception of motion is implied,
is suggested, by how they’re built.

That evening, I was at the window in the hall
watching the leaves get raked,
and my eye blurred—and although the leaves will blur
with the wind in them,

it was my one eye that blurred them, smudged them,
and I felt weak enough
to sit down. I suddenly felt insulted, as if children
know how long the leaves take

to play dead. I considered a future of memory loss,
but not as a writer—
the recurrent numbness of it in facial tics,
a drooping left arm, trouble seeing,

trouble walking. I slept. Judith brought us supper,
and she and Emma visited.
In bed I start thinking whatever happened
is the first step in mom’s inherited

dementia, and not just the distraction
the writer needs to be distracted-from—
where you think what you see in others will help
them maybe see themselves,

but being the distraction, being there,
with a warm blanket and with vital signs.

ii

An intruder, on the porch in November,
with a warm blanket and camomile tea
I leave untouched. Wary of shortcuts, I would be
wheeled down main roads, where

the word churchyard would mean something—
the confinement of identity—
and my mind wears me out, and my thoughts take me
to my funeral, who comes.

Saturday, Alice comes to rake and bundle leaves,
a distraction. I take two Effexors,
and my mother visits me, and I am my mother—
a pendulum metaphor for fall.

Conditions of domesticity, economies of scale,
replicated visual patterns
in quilts, ogee-shaped A-frame wartime row houses
look forlorn, if that’s the right word.

And Monday we pack and drive to Sydney,
where we have lunch and
I cannot go on, a recurring theme, and have to taxi
home—unfaithful, an intruder.

At lunch I return to the porch, a portmanteau,
and don’t go to the retirement party for Bob.
At Becky’s I theorize: it’s not what you did,
but what you do with what you did.

I meditate simultaneous mountain luminosity
and lost mind, which is one effect of the Effexor—
the orange sunlight in the air like aubergine, is audio,
in that it faintly arcs up,

and the men carrying iceblocks wear weight belts,
and lift me like a medicine ball.

_____________________________________________________________________

Glut

Glut evening, the butchered pink meat
of the low sun in red cedar, is glut—
offshoots of which shaman the low shrub
row of rhododendrons off pink.

It hurts when you leave, old school.
I have to see the distances differently:
a history of windows as January in Vancouver,
indoors, in a ground-floor studio apartment

with two windows, with two jade plants
in both windows. The evening monsoon,
with a white center, uniform in a crosswise sky
pattern, has gray inclusions of Rothko

in the crossed-out clouds, because
I know how much you hated Rothko.
I even Rothko new growth redwoods
on weekends. Wary of shortcuts,

I walk Commercial on weekends,
where I Rothko the water to make it look marbled.
I Sanskrit MÂT, which comes
out the color of wet moss,

on the seawall viaduct stonework.
I separate what I see from what I saw
with you, or through you, Woman.
A history of windows is January in Vancouver

indoors, through screen doors,
as a man of science butchers the sun
into a Rothko orange on red, on red,
the rain-shine of which shamans

the low rhododendrons off pink.