RUNNING 
 
Half-wild, this road 
has lost its snow. 
Only gravel and wet sand 
feel my feet chained 
to fartlecks, the heart's 
commands of lefts and rights 
through a cool evening blue. 
Birds warn their mates of 
a stranger through 
gray vacancies of leaves. 
 
A plover.  Its laughter scatters 
the path of air into 
sweeping water. 

I'm soaked in mud 
but can't stop moving 
ankles creaking. 
Yesterday, my car's choke 
faltered over changing air. 
Words run into 
ink the sky keeps 
releasing, new water 
refusing to not move. 
 
Near the birches and cedars 
there, scuffles 
leave bloodstains on young willows.  Why 
do I hurt so -- 
ankles, knees, head, 
chest heaving lungs into 
hands around a knife, slicing 
the frost as it flowers 
Why 
 
is this hard on me -- 
returning to this running 
over stones locked in shifting 
clay?  Where is this wind my body 
chases?  Some hot, glad animal  
closes in. 
 
 

 
JEWELS 
 
I can make what I want here, call this place 
South Africa, a claustrophobic womb, wait patiently 
for justice to suck me out into some glad nothingness 
with no colour, no light left -- the bruises gone 
or unimportant.  I can make whatever I want of  
this sack, hurting my shoulders -- it's too full of jewels. 
They stuff my pockets so I can't move.  Rubied wounds, 
the hard blue mornings I was unable to handle, 
the tiny green islands around my lady's finger ... 
It is all travel, rough work, back and forth to 
old places until I rock, a child in a rattling cart 
mining the ground, deeper, deeper into shifting 
dust, day into day into -- damned my swaying back. 
 
An adolescent weakening reaches the knees, my shoulders 
slanting badly away from this road.  I keep turning 
into myself as the jewels hide, as they cut me, then 
shine.  I wear the last light they gave.  I wear 
a slow smile, gentle and hardly there but the jewels 
mark me.  I sign their cheque book, read 36% -- 
Modern Poetry.  I touch above my shoulder blade where 
Gwen kissed.  I feel the mark, a train's moon 
that enlarges as it enters you.  Goddamned the sway, 
this little rest after the puppet dance, poor pay, hard 
travel from each broken Eden.  The road cuts my feet: 
smithereens, scarlet marks of what love can't carry. 
Damned these fingers, dull, cumbersome, heavier and busier 
about their Braille.  The jewels burn holes because 
my fingers hanker so.  My hands -- seamless pockets, 
dark and empty.  I can barely hold them open as if I were 
Nas-shig-y'alth, that bastard chief mining the darkness 
while his tribe ate grubworms, his sack a dead weight 
of light he'd taken.  He could have burned their eyes 
out with you.  He could have done this. 
 
Raven.  take me up again until I see the jewels that 
make me:  my father's eye that night, looking through me 
until I couldn't sleep, my mother's mouth. 
her tones of voice moving in me like blood, 
fingertips of each woman who has touched my hand 
with her hand, the amber hands of brothers, friends, 
the black moon sliding across winter's glass, 
my sister's first twirls in her 3 year old yellow wool 
and galoshes -- these are all with me.  Take them, 
Raven, into this darkness which is my life.  I wear 
your ring, its seal beautiful as the wax sears. 
Scatter the jewels, good black bird, wise and generous 
trickster.  I want them everywhere:  young blue ones 
of each night before, the red glimmerings of age, 
the dwarfs I barely remember. Let them cut 
through dark glass, this night that weighs down 
with hard cold.  Take me far 
through this smokehole, closer ... I must melt soon into my own image.  
Make me all wings, a sudden falling. 
 
 

 
WOMEN WEEPING AT KISPIOX 
 
Their faces are the house posts cut from soft wood 
of cedar beams.  Some red, some black lines barely hold 
the rain back.  There is the beaver clan and the frog clan, 
the bear's family, the raven and all are sad. 
The Skeena's a mean creek emptied from their veins until 
the body becomes all water.  Their time floats away. 
 
I saw the conference at Kispiox.  Chief Dan spoke 
of words.  Hunters, of guns while the trappers defended 
the conibear.  The dance was glad but sad really 
like a last pow wow among clouds, then thunder 
and no light.  John Stanley spoke of plumbing in Stoney Creek: 
Soon, these houses won't stand.  All we'll have is our own 
 
survival.  "Return, good bear," he prayed, "helping 
spirit.  Trees, relieve us, shelter."  The birds wouldn't defend 
but there'll be berries, mushrooms.  These women's faces 
soften with their own water.  It's hard to know if they're suffering 
like demons or angels.  Their daughter walks, manless, 
out of town.  Her feet toss sprays of tiny deaths behind her. 
 
The sky balances its hoop dance.  She sees the earth's egg. 
She glimpses the raven's shoulders turning into wind. 
The clouds shift onto the rockface over Trembleur Lake, sunglint 
hurting, near Hazelton -- the mantles of the Seven Sisters. 
These totems, these few remains, weep themselves away.  Rose, 
what shall we do, old friend? -- Visit Taché, tell of K'san's 
 
ladders for the people, bright fevers reaching back 
to health?  We went to Kispiox, hoped for a few moments 
while Edgar John got drunk, Darryl Joseph -- stoned at thirteen, 
Louis George, stabbed -- misunderstanding beside a cold stove, 
late winter.  These women close in like night visions, weeping 
wood, faces veiled by faith saving beauty, red coat justice 
scouring mountains and Simon, last buck, rages himself away. 
 
 

 
WRITING SOMETHING 
 
At 4:30 I woke up 
to drink coffee, eat homemade bread, 
listen to Rampal play something while my eardrums 
managed crazy arabesques in their dark 
rehearsals, and look for a utensil 
 
for ten minutes 
beside the lamp Grandma left, 
sputtering its message 
of wake, wake, wake, so I could 
write something. 
 
Now it's 7 A.M. 
Rampal's achievements have gone the way 
of the school marm in my clock's bell 
and something is happening with light beyond 
my window.  I've done everything 
but something we both might be ashamed of -- 
those humorous murders in the mirror.  Reader 
I see your shadow there. 
 
There's a duck a girl gave me 
because I must have taught her something ... 
I've tried for half an hour; it's not 
quacked back.  Meanwhile, something can be heard 
of the Canada's and the grebe's return -- 
pre echoes of my voice saying to my daughter 
"Look at the pond, Honey -- They're here again." 
She'll mutter something even wiser than my silence 
then we'll both look away at something else. 
 
I heard a wind picking up near my car wheels. 
The itchy devils want to go.  I've still 
not written something, so I've been reading 
how we are kites chasing a wind that gives us 
something to chase with unmoved wills. 
 
Now I am afraid:  the sage writes 
make no vows, no promise to yourself 
such as "Tomorrow, I'll wake at 4, 4:30 
and put something down on the empty page." 
Also.  God does not love fools, 
even his own fools, the scribe contends ... 
I look down at my hands, twiddling inkstains 
and this page, perfect with that silence, full 
of nothing but an effort to blank 
the wind out, tugging at a curtain 
just a notch, tugging at some womb. 
praying that something dreadful won't happen 
to my car.  Grandma's lamp, my hockey team. 
 
 

 
FUDGE AND COFFEE 
 
When we skied today, the hills 
would flatten.  Du fond, au Quebec- 
when in Rome ... Across the dam, birches 
light demonstrations. 
 
Olive and Roland 
were finishing breakfast.  Married 
forty years. Their cabin on the river 
is a place for faces, stories told 
of Indians here, the change 
in children, of how the clouds 
and animals move.  We stumble 
through joual our books can't master, 
drink coffee and eat fudge, our skis 
outside.  Olive give you the recipe. 
You outline yours for granola, 
avec, Roland comments, "Bonne 
ecriture."  I steal some fudge 
in a half-secret plastic bag 
for Marc, back home, keeping 
our precious kid.  No room 
in my vest for cardboard boxes. 
Olive used a box eight days ago. 
 
Grandma used boxes too, her best fudge -- maple, 
Mom could never use 
the recipe -- either too soft or hard 
or sweet, because of the oven.  After 
Grandma died, Mom never tried again. 
 
In Prince George, we bought 
our skis on sale, blowing our stipends 
like pub money for wedding rings. 
I'd come home after 50 tries, 49 
unsuccessful, almost dangerous, entirely 
comedy -- that hill veering through 
Fraser's ravine.  Wrapped in brown 
paper around a box, fudge and cookies 
waited in my mail for me. 
 
Mitts too, Grandma's design -- two -- 
toned green.  My mad aunt.  Kaye 
sent them with a note.  Can't recall 
the words, though I cried 
reading her scribbled prayer.  I'd 
just heard on the phone the night before 
about her breakdown.  How many 
til then, I don't know.  When 
we buried her in Timmins, what -- 
the year we married, four hulking 
brothers -- we blubbered away ... 
John singing above the choir 
"How Great Thou Art."  They'd  
been married like us -- a couple of years. 
Looking at my feet, I see a tear 
on leather.  I'm with Kaye -- '72, skipping Chemistry. 
 
She tells me 
walk on the outside, learn 
to protect a woman.  I sneak toys 
out of her basket in the Chainways 
store.  She'd treat the whole world 
to butterscotch sundaes but no --  
now, in that red booth, with her toes 
curling up, it's only me. 
 
I think we should wax up our skis 
again, those fast candles 
full of the blue flame sky lights 
on a cold day, visit 
Olive and Roland for fudge and coffee, 
get our Lara when we return, then 
see Uncle John.  The weather's 
bad, but it's not that far 
to Timmins.  I could play darts 
with him, down some beers. 
We'd argue about the Maple Leafs. 
How could a guy with muscular dystrophy 
know a damned thing about hockey, 
anyway?  I know, Honey, 
you hate the thought of driving. 
Since we slid into the ditch 
last month, jolted end over end, 
the north's no longer innocent for you. 
The moon's a pirate's eye, night 
a plank the sword winds push us off,  
along. 
 
What people were with us 
then, what angels, arms of God 
that kept our child?  Irish Granny, 
my Grandad?  A French Canadian 
Grandma who mastered arts of listening 
while she'd cook fudge and steep 
the tea?  I sensed a man I've never met -- 
your father, if flesh is the only way 
a person's known.  Our trunk.  Full 
of gifts for Christmas. that upturned 
car containing presents too an aunt 
had filled from her anxious winter basket. 
prayers I still can't understand. 
 
 

 
INN 
 
And her, Jake, swollen with a winter child 
inside, those hands small, white, rough 
with journeying, and his hands, rock stilled 
 
with working, with leading his woman's donkey 
home, they said, to David ... But you laughed, 
Jake, at his fear and her bigness.  "One key's 
 
left" (you bastard) and you marched them 
through December muck, rainshadows, pushed 
the gate wide to cattle shit and straw.  I watched them: 
 
they cloaked one opening and made a light 
for themselves, a light for seeing, though the dark 
seemed hardened by stars heavy as grains of wheat 
 
or desert, promises to old fathers. You made 
peace with me -- you'd barely charge them the work 
not much compared to this business, this glad 
 
travelling of the rich back to their source. 
And the poor.  It wasn't until after.  I saw 
a veil on the bed in that last room.  Was it by force 
 
you took her, or was this arranged, like a love  
I try to forget and forget.  Remember? 
You told them "full" but you crept to Sara's cave 
 
that night with a rage or an emptiness. 
And that girl -- "a pretty piece," a tempting hem.  Her 
time was closer than we both could guess. 
 
You were returning from that empty room. 
It was early.  Light softened the walls.  How 
your feet tripped, camel-cleft, devil-cleft, some 
 
of your desire gone out, or fired full, or dry. 
The animals had that look of birth or travel, 
their eyes glad with worry each time that child would cry. 
 
 

 
POSTCARDS 
 
Arrangements, unanswered letters? 
They hold their place well, in perpetual transit 
from open drawers.  Each duck and sunset, unholy flowers 
crave a word I might send a friend. 
 
Flying down Highway 11, my daughter flips open 
her frozen meatbox of cards with care, explains 
to her Granny from Ireland "I like collecting them," 
then presents like a last graduation of dreams 
each occasion's place, name.  Later, 
I tuck her in with a book, a song on tape, 
a prayer for all these people in her cards. 
 
8:45 : Her brother's pink covers, soft wool, the rooster 
which wakes him early, the horse which carries him away 
or the silo on Grandma's rug, heavy with the harvest of play 
 
These can't handle him.  A strange room.  His grandparents' 
bed.  The dark falls to shapes, threatens him, 
his usual room with Granny there.  I'm "side" feigning 
sleep, my face wet with hot kisses as a truck 
wheels over my nose until I'm gone the place of parents 
falling to example.  Close calls, bills enlarging into 
monsters.  Old friends nagging for cards and letters ... 
Sleep's conspiracies make me hide 
like the Friar with the same haircut my wife has snipped 
onto my son, heroic robbers who've owned these wilds, hid 
 
from death.  First, I try to tuck the news away -- 
Cambodia, people drifting like ghosts 
from their own hunger -- one woman still 
beautiful, perhaps quiet, her small son wrapped 
with soft hockey tape for his burns, his face 
full of angry questions and I cut this card out 
like last night.  Ken's paper tuxedo, tuck it away 
in my own dark places, carry the boy, 
his mother, the stick man hooked up to western luck 
and intravenous.  I walk with the postcard until 
its grows unkempt.  Heavy, until I must finally cut something 
out of me, or write or fly myself into hard travel. 
 
 

 
THE TABLE 
 
The white table was freezing movement, with nicks from heavy dishes or a 
kid's fork, missing.  My son's plate was still half-filled, the macaroni glowing 
with orange light, his blood's half hunger.  His voice lifted from the 
basement with my daughter's voice, each drawing lines around and between 
themselves as furniture dragged skate marks into the carpet.  They were 
making a place, playing house and the sharp insistences of who would be 
who (how) warmed the stairs with their names, their love, their distance.  To 
the left, the fruit leaped at the eye, taking up space, that odd third dimension 
(If I reached them, there might be something I could hold or eat until the 
apple would be in my brain, and the banana that still wore the sun's mark 
from a place Gaugin had visited until he became ... changed -- one wife and 
daughter somewhere else -- the banana would reach loins and that soft soil, 
that bog, would grow sore with pressure and potassium, the peach might 
carve its own poisoned stone from my heart.)  It is to identify them as aflame 
and there, like the cloud that last night, hung beneath a full moon in a clear 
dark, all late September stars.  Its edge curved, widening in all directions at 
once.  It is to say they were planets in some half fated or providential, 
serendipitous reunion for my tired eyes.  The dessert bowls were not cupped 
hands of angels, but the rice was soft, milky and sweet.  The knives weren't 
pirate swords, the forks not pitchforks, but how did they fail there on the 
table with that absent magic of having a job done, laying in angles imagined 
in the Pythagorus or deaf Beethoven in God's thought?  What was the plant 
thinking -- suddenly arrived in a red basket because of a sale?  Its tag said 
four dollars; its green leaves seemed dervish mad with reaching for life.  
Under the woollen lightshade, the air moved in a jazz dance, in passionate 
detachment that must have held dust from my own breathing, my own dying 
skin.  Each object located itself precisely with a random joy, entropic 
surrender, indifferently aware of the other, sparks flying invisibly yet heard 
in my own heart's slow heat -- its blind dog vision, until I became the bowl in 
the hand of a desperate grateful beggar, catching a coin from a friend on a 
street in Algiers or on that street in Dublin.  Our baby was cooing in her 
room a language she'd not yet forgotten, interspersed with calls of Da Da Da 
(filling her diaper), while from woods behind us, jays were taking blue 
wafers from the sky and bringing them to nests in dwarfed cedars.  Soon 
some partridges would fly off the handles  of their own drumming ground, 
while echoing, our hearts would catch other distances, a human thunder. 
 
 

 
PLOVER 
 
I love how the spring air 
hovers over the woods 
after a light rain, brings 
me to the plover, 
 
the wind carrying gold there 
in its wings.  Its flight,  
a silent soundwave, dips 
then lifts like 
Mary's songs. 
 
I love the plover 
its colours of cold, 
snow on dark wood, 
cut wood, bold 
as ground flying. 
 
Last spring, 
all down the valley, 
I called beside the water 
to a new sky 
I could not resist 
as it listened 
or did not listen: 
 
I love the plover. 
 
I love the plover. 
 
 

 
ANTARCTICA 
 
It's because my colony's finally a nation: 
so settled, I get restless with Orion, dancing 
his hunt out with high white stars and so 
Australia crosses me often.  I avoid 
the dry grassless stretches, head for 
Fosters in the outback where I control 
dogs and crocodiles.  There, lust must be 
melodramatic, the ghosts of old steamships 
yawning up a Mississippi.  Imagine gazing 
at the southern hemisphere forever, 
configurations I've never seen, a night 
like a kangaroo's dark pocket 
mothering us to leaps beyond our kenning. 
 
But then I'd be too close to Antarctica, 
continent of stillness, heatless white light. 
Imagine a formal on a hockey rink, penguins 
like black and white frozen magpies lost 
for a green field, caught with jock itch 
and hernia, afraid to warm themselves into flight. 
Their eggs?  It's a beer commercial running 
away -- all ice, water -- those shrunken yuppies, 
heads bobbing with obsequies and squash, 
a court no God will let you out of ... 
 
It might be romantic, even epic.  Consider 
Batman landing in his Bat hovercraftmobile, 
complete with gas line anti-freeze, rear 

ice defogger for presidents or uncertain members 
of Revenue Canada or the Mafia.  Even if 
there's no rent there, I've developed  
a distaste for the virgin's uncontrolled 
frigidity, the holy man's steel blue eye 
when there's no bar around, or worse, 
no library to distract with ice-fogged mirages 
of human wisdom.  It must have like this 
for Admiral Scott -- 
at first, believing 
he carried the Word of God or Queen Victoria 
to those munchkin birds, straight from 
the horse's mouth to carve into eternity 
or ice.  But imagine yourself there - 
all those men so bored for visions that they 
grew fond of each other, then spiteful, 
hungry, even worse.  Perhaps a few conjured 
a love for Keats or Shakespeare or the imagery 
in Kubla Khan ... I'm glad I keep 
 
landing here, that the money for my ticket 
lies between my hockey bag and bucksaw 
in an empty bottle on my Bible, thesaurus 
and varied selections from the bat 
words stilled, chilled masters whom I toast  
at times with beer and wine.  Bread, flowers. 
 
 

 
REAR VIEW 
 
It's maddening, to catch these faces 
half familiar in darkening twilight 
 
of moving windows, these headlit moons 
 
almost about to arrive 
like one last offer of your lost lover's breast 
 
your fever close though distant -- 
 
this milky expressway of exits/entrances, 
green signs heavy with white names 
 
of travel, each one a step, a kind 
 
of home.  You press the pedal 
anxiously, these white eyes of strangers 
 
wearing red traces of quick stops, quick 
 
silver lifts out of this night's cold flow 
and you see your brother -- he's winding up -- 
 
a knuckleball.  You see your old skates 
 
glinting, your father cleaning the basement 
in a rage, that house sold for over two years 
 
and you see your sister as someone else -- 
 
she acts that well.  Your mother's at a camp 
for poor kids, her stories -- low horns 
 
waking you out of a summer's yawn 
 
and you see the books, Christ, written 
by writers, and the lovers, how they typed 
 
glad brief poems all over your skin. 
 
Each face you leave makes your darkness 
precise, each round light a Eucharist 
 
melting to the tongue's gratitude. 
 
Now your hand clutches vacant space, hugs 
an emptying wheel rich with facts, 
 
figures, this hungry mirror of you you you 
 
moving you across this asphalt park 
like a crippled dancer, pressing his song 
like heavy time right through the floor. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Denis Stokes teaches English to high school students and recently won first place for poetry in the NU-NOW literary contest. He lives in Callander, a small community in Northern Ontario.