Off The Masham-Eardley Road

November under a
fleece-shearing sky
we hike trail past
beaver-sharp poplars
a polyphony of birdcall
and chickadees like summer's
    castoff leaves
       scrabbling dirt.

We pass Mud Lake
dark and smooth as
           isinglass
white birch repeating
and repeating
    on its surface
like a Thomson painting.

Shying toward us
over a granite litter
a lavender-coated mink
slinking white-bellied
to peer feverish eyes
then evaporate.

The forest is acrid
and a pheasant panics
the undergrowth in a
pandemonium of leaves.
A grouse flaps high
in the branches of an ash

and a woodpecker clowns,
down-hanging a branch
like a drunken bat.
We meet other solitudes
in this Gatineau place.

Apocrypha

In the beginning there was chaos
until a gregarious atom
encouraged a clubby atmosphere
where they all gathered and
finally, there was order.

At first there were hot gases
but then cool season prevailed
and minerals and metals crusted
the fires. One lone amoeba

suffered incurable hubris;
thought she could do better
and founded a dynasty
on her vision. In time, a
she-ape clambered down from the trees,

pointed at the sea and declared
'there is my Creatrix!'
named her daughter Eve and set
her the task of naming others.

So Eve chatted up giraffes
and elephants, whales and crickets.
She called a brash Adamai
snake-in-the-grass for offering
her figs when she said

she couldn't give a damnation
for his ignorance. Everything
was fine until he learned
to wield a pen while she

continued to till the earth.
Eve provided crops 
for their offspring and Adamai
pushed back the night of eternity

offering superiority and his
own rendering of truth;
that of himself as Supreme Creator
half of him up there,
the other half down here.

Letters Home/Sylvia Plath

She would be a meteor
a fabled Amazon of letters
         not for her the
half-life   the shrivelled ego
of the forgotten woman
who penned disappointment;
   she wrote this way to
encourage capricious fate
so in its dark unknowing way
it would know her for the
winner she willed herself to be.

She met a man with whom
she could meet her jealous Muse
with a voice like the
          thunder of God
knew without knowing
what dark forces moved in her;
that the huge, sad hole
she was destined to fall into
was merely removed in time.

       Letters to Mother
celebrated success after success
          and unbridled pride
the sure knowledge that no one
was as gifted    as feted as
joyously filled with life and
promise as herself     as her
dear, lovely Ted with the
voice like the thunder of God.

Joy brimmed her letters
spilled from the pages
tripped off alphabets spelling
beauty and talent and pride and
determination and that intense
preoccupation with all that
mattered:   self. Why didn't
Mummy ever twig, respond to that
outpouring, warn that no one

as happy as her daughter
could possibly pen those arcane
depths of despair, loneliness
and unperceived loss?  The
letters traversed a one-way
street with no room for
marginal notes, no corrections
no warnings, no hint of cessation.

Motherplant

Roseate and convoluted bud
what a delight you are
             like a foetus
curled and living green
suckling sustenance from
the androgynous motherplant
with the ridiculous name of
Schlumbergera. Even the

name made me think of
slumbering and rocking my
own roseate pearl to sleep;
she who is now grown and has
that strange convoluted buttress
of will, shuttering me
            out of her shell.

Perspective

What rain?  my father
used to say - - -
      it's only
                God,
                        crying.

Oh, he was an
irreverent man
and I was left to
grapple with the
compelling vision
of a broody God
crying fits like me
hands fisted in hard balls
of angry frustration
showering the earth
clouds insufficient
handkerchiefs
to stem the overflow.

Judgement Day

Judge not lest you be judged, wisely
proclaimed biblical sages who counselled
against social pathologies injurious
to the welfare of humankind. For
we are all too often not given to
kindness and compassion for one
another, choosing instead from
among the emotions instilled within
our psyches, destructive inclinations
of gossip, slander, invoking the
righteous wisdom of superiority
and entitlements while denying that
others are similarly gifted, leading
to tribal, clan and sectarian hatreds
resulting in mass migrations of
violent displacement, possessions
looted, the designated lesser mortals
slaughtered, while the originator
whose blueprint for survival these
evils represent scowls reprovingly,
and moves to do ... nothing. Omnipotent,
omniscient, omnipresent and abundantly
indifferent. So why may god his very self
not be judged on the historical record
of his unholy, disastrous failures?

Father

An irreverent man he was
knowing how gritty life truly
is; orphaned at ten, roaming
the streets of Warsaw at thirteen
escaped from a nearby shtetl
poorhouse, searching for a long
lost older brother who left 'home'
before him, then scooped by an
orphan rescue group by beneficent
elders to be shipped out en masse
to Canada as indentured farm
labourers. At least he escaped
the Holocaust. Ingrate that he was, 
he quipped to me his eldest 
yet a child not to fret over the rain, 
for it was only god, crying, and 
soon would pass. Myself now far 
older than the years allotted my father, 
I have seen god frequently weeping.
He seems to do little else. I am long 
past wondering that he does not 
bellow with thunderous rage over his 
impotent incompetence, defending the 
vulnerable from their tormentors. 
Whose responsibility then, is that other 
than the supreme essence that created 
the passions of avarice, anger and 
malevolent murderous violence?