Sample Poems:

The Time of Falling Apart

I’m a dragon woman, born in a dragon year
and by the zodiac’s account, I should be
tenacious, confident, powerful, generous.
Lucky, too. Should marry rat, monkey, or rooster.                              
Sadly, this year’s zodiac is less optimistic.
I am opposed by Tai Sui, god of age,
who foresees an overall lack of good luck,
the outlook for my health also unfortunate
as I approach the time of falling apart.
Some of my losses are careless, rather than tragic:
I lose my glasses before finding them on my head
and have lost enough hearing to embarrass myself regularly.
But what other deserters have left my memory palace?
What of my keys, grocery lists, important dates,
the name of that nice woman in the blue shirt,
the best way through East Van, my favourite socks?
Self- pruning, fruit reduces its pull- force
so it falls away easily, energies no longer required.
How is it that I who careened merrily
across two provinces, three mountain ranges
to meet my lover,
now avoid night driving, parallel parking?

​  ~

In pools of crystalizing snow, these sodden Garry oak leaves.
I’m drawn to winter branches, their spareness and latency.
If you look past the oak’s roots,
up its gnarled bark corrugations, its lichen armour,
past its branches’ baroque skew, stub of an amputated limb
in its cozy sleeve of moss, past a fretwork of twigs,
you might fall up into the sky.
Frilly white barnacles of lichen.
Burying my hands in mossy ruffles,
I remember running my fingers
through my son’s springy hair.
I flatline to think of it.

   ~

The year’s nights draw in
and veins of leaves close like blocked arteries.
Their barrier of thin- walled cells
whose purpose it is to break down in autumn
as it approaches the time of falling apart,
as it invites abscission, the separation of stem from leaf,
of horn from skull, of claw, husk;
also from those who renew themselves seasonally,
salamanders shed body parts to shun predation,
or those who’d rather sacrifice a breast
than yield it prey to a malignancy.

   ~

Some years ago in Cowichan Valley,
A Quw’utsun Elder, master carver, explained
near- final stages of a pole he’d made.
Power: its carved and sombre range of mythic predators.
Before we left, he asked quietly, What is your predator?
Before we left, we held hands, he said a prayer.
I’d just had my diagnosis two days before.
​
The oak’s twiggy black canopy engraves a wintery sky,
all grisaille reflections over the inlet’s glossy mirror
where doubled ducks confer cordially
over the long Vs of their contrails.