Patina
One corner brick
100 year old black blossom stained across
Northeast soot fading
to raw pink orange southwest
Checks the force of two walls
20 bricks under
100 press down from above
Victorian clay horse hauled in a rail cart
Maker’s eyes staring down the kiln’s glare
14 hour shift, blinks away coal and sand
‘The single brick mould had an advantage in that
a child could carry it to the drying area’
Steeltown, boomtown, border zone, sundown
Whose hands laid whose roofs sheltered
The art of the straight line, street lines
North of one, south of another
“Not transferred by sale, inheritance, gift, or otherwise,
nor rented, licensed to or occupied
by any person wholly or partly of
Negro, Asiatic, coloured or Semetic[sic] blood”
Sand-blasted spotless across the street.
“Overall, the respondents preferred the surfaces of
new materials, especially Brick3 and Stone3 (Table 6)”
Payday loans on one corner
BLM signs on the other
Out front, a new mother weeds a neglected garden
Children and birds wake
to a city scrubbing clean
Onward Snow
Bare snowflakes, expanding universe
Slow drift left, right
Everywhere but down
Onward snow
The grey, southerly glare side glints snowflakes
in phasing grids, dodecahedral mobiles
Maybe I can finally quantify the geometry of air
Distance
Walking the Grange, never quite warming up
The closer bodies step, the harder we look away
Breaths held
Never near enough to see who is mourning
And who is waiting to
All secretly packing
Killer, guard and escapee
Onward snow
Wartime sees the rockwall side of love
Cold, strong, with cracks everywhere
Still there’s good blood
under city scabs
Age of suspicion
Good blood scab
The snapping of an exhausted parent
Good blood scab
A refugee boy dies working a nursing home
Come so far to have life drunk dry
by strange ghosts, neglected too
Best blood wound
hemorrhaging
Onward snow
Light the old engine of loneliness
with extra space the safe slow killer
as abstract as the glass spheres cracking round me
in the cold winter light
—The Grange, Toronto, January 2021
On chord progressions
After Regina Carter
Skyward jazz
moon spoon the fetal body
Notes tinker above
like ping
pong
stars
drops
pop
deafened ears
Ride the changes
conga circle
on a centrifugal orbit
Saturn
stacked
towers
of delicious
falling
through
downy
mattress
always
another through
back dive into that Milky Way
clockwork footholds
will not slip
on the buzz current
Ride the changes
Gravity’s nothing on a baseline
Earthquakes nothing on a clave zing
Ride the changes
stiff as muscles may be
will drift skyward
eyes
when the body lies back