My friends, may I propose a masked ball?

For how else to depict, defend, tell all

As such occasions allow? New Year’s here finds

Bodies blackening the canal, our backsides

Whitened by its froth. The crowd surges, set

For speed on metal blades, doubt and regret

Submerged in the exhilaration

Of skating under bridges, flying where we

Once drowned in steamy summer cataracts.

Here’s one more year to grind with stats and facts.

From the frozen gutter, celebrants look up,

Peer from under the mask’s lip, to see

Fire dashed from the sky’s mortar,

Where sheer intensity yields colour.

To...

Enter. Here we will clasp

hands or kiss lightly, so

I can enjoy the process, grasp

the mild erotic flow

of guests who’ve found

this passive point of entry

they’ve left their boots around.

(One only has to try;

A foot in the door and

I’m taken in.) Throw off your coat,

entrust that bottle to my hand.

My smile greets your bare throat.

Your costume, as always, fits.

I whisper that your secret

is safe with me. And yet,

here, cloistered, one admits

Desire, and that this

departing arrival

could form the basis

of some longer interval.

You hear...

Thoughts of going it alone are

rare as miracles this year.

A bad fall on day one

cracked your wrist, and left

the knot of bones plastered up

for weeks to come.

You managed a bath, and strangers

opened doors for you. But getting

your tie on means two very different

mornings, yours and mine, must meet.

We stand still, embarrassed

to be caught, again, acting out

scenes of men and women

charmed by the menial.

My mother and father

stood like this, eyes down,

working their mouths and hands

because someone was watching.

Any child could see

the exception...

Rest, me for the moment, you for eternity.

Camphor fumes grow familiar in the room

of your last days. In this place that time’s worn out

I seek completion, to preserve the scene

when you slip out of life as if through velvet drapes,

robbing nothing from the moment, and leaving me a passage,

a final phrase to carry into the next day’s light,

the carnival streets where I, too, make life recoil.

The mere thought of that see-saw second can ease undying fears:

the mirror unclouded at your nostril, hands resting

on bedsheets blurred with mercurial shadows.

Such sheafs,...

Hopeless to survive the sun, this love of mine

will drown you in the Nile to suit its own design.

Let death be the price for choosing favourites.

We’ve defined our Eden, still and bright,

and each day the arrangement trips us up,

like the small god who mistakes what’s yours for mine.

Nothing left but to flirt with the infernal,

find fears in late-day silence and

speak well of the casket that gift-wraps us

for Heaven with skill and design.

Gods marvel, no doubt, at mortal longings,

puzzle over how we play at forever,

saying that we dwell in...

“You are not a statue,” she tells him.

“You are an obelisk that winks,” he says.

That’s all they speak, hoping not to violate

The possibilities that rise like summer sweat.

He bends, in an arch, as if there were

Something fast between them.

Part of her is hidden by his forearm,

A brace of polished wood, hollow if tapped,

Which joins the aged bicep and scarred shoulder

And holds him to the portrait she becomes.

She sees herself stretch into the landscape,

Sets her eyes on the shadow that colours her thighs.

Her breasts rest like water, raised by...

When Antonius sank

in sight of Ramses’ shore,

his body was washed blank;

his life etched out in ore.

Hadrian, for love’s survival,

taxed the local idiom

to stage his friend’s revival,

with sun and stone as medium.

The favourite’s name collected

a cultish people’s love

and wreaths on his erected

form, high and hewn. Above

all, he’s perfect: Maleness

bare, delineated,

an answer to men’s distress,

those who painted

wives as Cleopatra,

chiseled mothers crouching

like the Sphinx. What extra

poise he gained from touching

Heaven. Monumental

phallic object.

Yes, but for me, it all

boils down to his...

My home has a hundred pipes leading in,

plus fissures, wires. Its borders thin

in places to a single pane of glass.

I’ll take you in whatever shape you need

to get inside, past the watching eyes

that haunt the front door and the back.

They expect you any day,

on a white horse, in Hugo Boss duds,

dripping with someone’s blood. If you’re seen,

they’ll make demands, draw up the papers for

incorporation. They’ll watch the ink dry

and wait it out, fondling their disbelief.

I will not measure you for memories,

paint you on black velvet and admire...

Swerving to avoid this year’s gust of pain,

I stick to the well-weathered talk of the street.

And who’d have thought winter would be so mild?

As the season enters with a slow bow, I’m hunched,

bending to look at stars resting in puddles —

not their reflection, just a cold light where it’s held.

A few flakes fall like scraps. Soon a film

covers the windows and moves in, transposed.

At night the empty parks blaze orange-blue,

green-red: a polar opposition and welcome oversight

in a city spent from deficit reduction.

“My own dog, gone commercial!” Charlie Brown lisps

as...

“One drop of that stuff and bang!” he said,

his hands circling like birds or bees, for effect.

In another drive-thru sermon, my father

was supplying the fuel to further

distance my life from his. I detect

one message as we race apart: I’m ahead.

“She was pregnant, wasn’t, then again ...”

More talk from friends revolves around

this recurring idea, or act. New life.

A topic that troubles as I turn a new leaf,

and start to think of children, around

the age my mother swore off labour pain

for life. Desire has led me to men,

doubled my...

This is a trick of my father’s,

That I must, once again, teach myself,

Folded in the sharp hiss of steam.

First, my fingers trace

Cheek and chin melting in the shower’s

Flowing glaze, sight unseen.

Then the blade comes into play,

Inching blindly along a path it completes

In a few heartbeats with a mirror’s help.

I feel my way into the anxious

Thrill of cutting it close,

Remaking myself, beardless ... sexless?

My fingers stroke the throat’s Gibraltar,

Its message adamant: to the touch

My imaginings are off the map.

Back at the flattering mirror,

In the curtains’...

The sea brought us smack together. Inevitable,

though neither chose the course that brought us

head to head. Limbs or tentacles do little more

than serve their purpose: propel, paralyse, give pain.

In my face, it trails poison strands, a pumping

lung of phlegm or brackish lymph. I freeze

in the ache of fight or flight, the fear

of a soft-bodied, mindless menace,

gripped by the urge to hurt, to hide, to deny.

I escape the water scarred with stings:

mother sea's reminder of when we dumped

her and rose upright to the land. From above,

I see them pumping...

Tapping fingers keep time. Looking to the clock

(Hunkered down between the ferns) on the up beat,

I come face to face with the moment’s emotion,

(Asking for my status: starting early... running late?)

The brief despair of seeing unwound time:

Hours sit, unfractioned, around its steady hands.

It’s a gift from a relative, no emotion

(The music curves out of mind, like a question mark)

Attached, just filling a need known to beat

In every heart and home. And the clock,

Neglected and run down, twice each day hands

Me an urgency, a marker, the veritable time.

Inanimate, it...

Her pace is slow, but I fall behind to illustrate

My distance from what she’s come to mean.

The glimmer of streetlight rises half an inch

From where her skates touch down on scourged ice.

Her round cap is the first sphere of a trio that ends in

A black skirt hanging from her fat behind.

Moving through the unmeasured, shifting night,

A loafer in each hand, she carries broken bread,

Sacred books or green boughs. The image of her

Waited for the cold's kiss to wake

Its likeness in my head. A few breaths end its captivity

In memory,...

Though it’s all about excess

(full to bursting she is)

her legs look starved below

the life-flooded abdomen.

She would not welcome the child

right now, unless it was shaped like

a footstool. She could not bend to

pick it up or feed it:

the food she sees she takes

to fill the unsevered hunger

the unborn dreams for her.

A presence, not diminutive but double,

sits behind her slanting eyes

as she swallows the last spoonful....

Renovation rolls into the new year

and they’re still living in two rooms,

lives and objects strung together

in a tight-knit cradle of a home.

The child runs back and forth,

trailing a toy and defective words.

They know it’s no great distance

from one room to another.

On grounds of either/or and “yes, but”

the domestic scene can change.

To hold it together, you sit

on the stove instead of a couch.

For love, you watch the sink like it’s TV,

and pass the milk like a prayer....

The tablecloth pink

As this raw moment

Beside the canal at dusk.

The waitress asks:

“You want that toasted?”

I say no, knowing that

I've already burned enough.

Spun outside my insulation,

I keep looking at blooms

Arranged in mouthfuls and

Algae-covered moorings,

Because heaven’s every feature

Has a twin in hell

And with this ripple past

The two will, like me, recollect

And claim they are one....

Like shadows clearing, the demons rush out

when I think of what I’ll build today.

They are dinosaurs rising with shifting jaws,

long madonnas trailing golden yarn, things

with wings and thin, knotted fingers.

I act fast on sketchy plans, with the urgency of

the childless man, who tries 30 on for size

and feels a pinch. Somewhere a scale

holding body and sense wavers, then tips.

At the hardware store, I join a long line

of men, some fathers, who have come

to weigh down their arms and load up the family van.

In the aisles, they measure and...

Still sticky from her lips,

the stitched description

of what she’ll wear that night

got up and walked away.

The story has taken on

a life a step away from hers.

Strapless, beltless, hanging.

At the bosom, a monstrous bow,

freed from the label

of accessory. The hide

is velvet, a dusty texture

altered by gestures into

refractions by Vermeer.

(Stripped and dripping,

the last bath towel

used to wipe the coffee cup

saved from the abandoned kitchen,

Monty jettisons the rod and,

in the ruin of a good set of drapes,

enters the living room in velour

cinched at...

Stroke by stroke, the world takes on

the pattern of our inconstant motion

as we paint a friend’s new home. The rooms

turn shining wet and white, like eggs

flung inside out to hold the days to come.

Oozing from the bucket’s spout,

the white on white effect spreads far beyond

our provocation: we brush against it,

it falls on us in pearls. It takes hold like

everything you live with does, even what

you’ve left behind.

I heard about the split today, what’s come

between who’s here and who's not. At least

a few of us have made up...

Three half-spheres, set mouth to mouth

As if I (agape) complete the set

And find my likeness in these domes

(Each more than my height,

Skinned with moon surface,

A lacquer of proscenium drape).

Their sheen is pure pigment.

Set free of base mix, the insoluble blue

Gives the vividness of scenes

That are seen as something new then

Shift back, again unseen.

You have sculpted the mind’s

Doghouse, an opening to no dimension,

A blackness that first looked solid

To the indifferent eye soon drawn in.

Next time, flashlight in hand,

I’ll add a bright chancre

Of ease into...

Please, take one more look. Lunacy, indeed.

No glow, just pitted and left to shine

Like the bloodless flush of half-life, still

Buckling under the human wish list,

Matter that yields to mortal fissions.

I looked my fill one night, drunk as a trout,

Mouth open to the tasteless water of

The northern lake. My constant embraces

Kept me afloat and ready to sink for good,

Cupped by the devil’s waters: scotch, summer and night.

Resting under the deflated day, I listen

To Vickers’ voice, open, open, open, no end

To breath, assuring his comrade or his woman.

I ingest...

Hired hands did in the scandal,

excised with yellowed veils the bits

that breed and nurse us into what

Michelangelo called

God’s image. As if we’d never guess

the parts from the imperfect whole.

Below his Judgement sat holy men,

scalded white and thin, who

put on scarlet robes and Latin phrases

to masquerade as monuments

and hide the eager, mortal hand.

But for the chosen, time was threatening.

The brimming, interminable mass

dragged on like the world’s last days.

Their eyes looked up, beyond the censure of

the horny finger and its ring, and turned,

full throttle, to the...

Judgement, the scene

that hangs my head.

Neither “the last” nor lasting,

the vision has suffered

100,000 considerations

and now a good wash as well.

Sponged free of dirt

and sepia complacencies,

it moves out of the world,

rippling fictively.

The eye can’t hold it.

Canonical weight breaks

into relics of the glorious whole

on the faded, ground-up

blue of edenic skies or

millennial wash-out.

In the search for authenticity,

every layer shields offence,

the tense space

where someone’s laboured

to skew perspective or

twist limbs ’til they agreed.

Skilled use of colour.

Lessons in the morgue.

Human arts of...

You fall silent, your response a captive of the deafened room.

Into the vacuum goes your prayer, speaking the crime

I'll answer for on Judgement Day.

I rest on the edge of my insistence and the threadbare sofa

that becomes your cradle in blind afternoon sleep.

Good Catholic boy, they pressed you down

with all the baggage, the ancient scripts that have us

in different corners: Poor in Spirit (that’s you)

despairs in hard squints below the shifting blinds,

tongue held in trust of doomsday gold,

as Worldly Desire (that’s me) brandishes the hope

that something less than death

can...

Smoked out of the city, the antidote

to the day’s admixture of heat and fatigue

was cool nature, a drive with friends

to the world at the water’s edge

that would clear our heads before

we’re drafted into sleep.

The people we meet on the way down

have tossed off more than us, though

we’d never thought to escape

something as simple as clothes.

They weave in and out of sight,

finally settling on the rocks in poses,

their eyes masked in the serenity

that comes when the final veil falls.

Upwind from theiresprit de corps,

my eyes rummage...

River and rapids flow on

And it’s beyond me, to capture

Each leaf in words or paint.

From above, I can imagine

A place in the locks, afloat,

Living life buoyed up

By lowering horizons,

Feeling the hidden current’s

Push towards the sky.

How much has passed over these

Flagstone spaces unimpeded,

Tossed down as if by thought

Into the water bordered by

Soil furrowed and black,

Grass levelled to mown thickness?

Take your moment on this concrete

Tongue, which cares enough to stress

Only intention, its proffered view....

For once, no words. Just conversation,

tossed around like a clear stone.

The days have shaken off their measurements

into the open boxes at the end of this so-called year.

Someone has hushed up the stores,

forgot to clear the sidewalk on the Laurier Bridge.

And in the newspapers, the annual attempt to

clean the smudge off has come up clean.

Some people were counted, among the countless dead.

It was out with the old, in with the neo.

Each evening people are appearing on TV

with light instead of skin, their bones uncertain.

There was something I had to...

“It was only for the sex,” he says

as we wait for the light to turn.

Or else it was to have a story to tell,

one we’ve all heard before.

Like the tale of the lover

who ate oat bran every meal,

only showeredaftersex,

became famous, or

beat me black and blue with words.

We mark them “ex,” then pluck

them out to illustrate when

the subject is the inner lining

of the stomach and what makes it

throb with a hidden, unseen ache.

Lost in the telling are

bits too delicious to share,

that ever since...

Where was I but in the kitchen (elbow deep

In what needs be done before I sleep)

While you set out our socks, side by side?

You relayed the simple fact at my side

With a kiss, holding out your delight,

Which caught us like the sun’s receding light

That still brings a glow, however small.

It appears our common stock, unmentionables et al.

Has gone up, like a new moon.

Tried, true and tired. Too much “real life”?

But old tongues have shown that

Puns preserve as surely as amber sap.

Our settings are indispensable,

Raising hardened truths until...

I’m stuck with the tour.

Giving it, that is. As a host,

it's the perfect way to manage the fear—

rushing in afresh with each arrival —

that I live too differently

or, worse, much the same.

I skew the directions, herd them on past

the bedroom walls, still the sorry pink we found them,

and the boxes that look dispossessed

even though they’re labelled by name and room.

(We just arrived ...is it five months now?)

But I’m guide, not guard, and one gets through

to the kitchen, a flirtatious pinch of a room,

and just as unsettling as a...

Scuttled to the kitchen

you find something set out

to thaw. Beans have been

soaking. A few still float

as you plunge fingers in

to the knuckle. Stir. Round

and cool, dark skins thin

enough to hatch. You’ve found

here both a child’s mind

thinking pebbles from a stream

and waters close behind

where senses rest in dream

and memories are held like

prisms of thought to your

retreating eye. So like

sauce that’s prepared before

to add flavour to the brunch,

the past can be seasoning

for a tame, hungover bunch:

Sinking down, beyond reasoning,

to where metaphor’s meat...

Ants in the bathroom.

With B-movie blather,

I say how much I care:

“The Encroachment of the Ants?”

Maybe. The slow insinuation

smacks of a James novel.

Still there they are,

strung out like seeds

or chatter on the page.

A room tiled with habits,

ornament of interlock and

fissure. In our home

shutting the door is

a tendency, but at times

deliberate. And now

we close ourselves in

with their slow

progress. They will leave.

What’s here but

a meal of suds or toothpaste

mint? All the good shit’s

whisked away....

“Now touch with the toe!” At first I prod,

The way you’d check a corpse for signs of life. But

My foot catches the beat. The touch

Goes short and sharp, for seven more, six more ...

This afternoon, I’ve kept my appointment with health,

As marked on the schedule I’ve pinned up.

I step in and out of squares we’re asked to imagine,

And we're cutting up the floor, for six more, five more ...

Legs and elbows tick-tock across the room, arms reaching,

To get air into that clutching vacuum of a muscle.

I trip by myself in...

We set a date to take possession, behind

the windows someone papered up

to hide the empty life inside:

a burlap backdrop never meant

to face the world alone, a few raw bricks

reduced to the job some dumb rock could do,

a line of mismatched nails, dusty logs.

Enough to make the emptiness complete.

For months the store repelled each applicant

with its vacant stare. Even as we sign, there is

no outward hint of acceptance, or disgust, in its

Little Orphan Annie eyes. And when it all comes down,

what of us goes on display? We’ve planned

a...

Lying in the room the sun

Cracks open, we wish

It could always be so bright,

In the places where we eat and sleep.

Last week you whitened this shell,

Brushed over its creases, “cut in” the windows,

Turned the pipes into their shadows.

Your white moves over me, sinks in.

The sloppy job has trailed a pile

Of speckled clothes. On your skin

The mottle of mole and hair

Turns white as I close my eyes.

When you are not here and light

Floods in, moving closer to leaving,

I remember and ache, floating

Like a black X off...