And he says he shivered when I showed him the picture of the poplars hugging what are the chancesof finding two poplars entwinedfor all their tree eternity?
or finding their fossilized couplingamongst hundreds that growin a straight and narrow stretchto dry prairie sky
I seek the greetingof inaudible-to-humandryad moansI hope to hear, as my own voicecurves around […]
these calloused sandstone outcroppings
are the teeth of Nose Hill
grinning, the whorls of stone chain linking
past, and watermarks meandering
like logos
stretching
your hands and arms across the grainy surface
then lift off your skin, tattooed with sandstone braids
etched into the hull of you,
refusing comfort in your skin,
you sit upon its surface
surf the rock, smooth, massage the stone against your palms
levitate […]
space
between imaginary lines
marking our mountains from theirs,
separating our scraggly unshaven spruce from those beyond
the thin boundry scars of transit and time
Big,
like our womenbuilt for birthing and beating
Big this place,
the boreal crosshatch of powerlines and leaseholds
the oily after-scent of second day clothes
the distance between pumpjacks and prostitutes
the way we keep it together
hold it […]
Crawling into cracks
of the old garden timbers,
the bees carry rolled up leaves.
Blueprints for a nest
or apian wallpaper?
The plans are still green
~ Richard Stevenson
Richard Stevenson teaches English and Creative Writing at Lethbridge College. Recent books include Parrot With Tourette’s (Black Moss, Palm Poets Series, 2006), Bye Bye Blackbird (Ekstasis Editions, 2007) (both poetry titles), and […]
Coals to Newcastle –
a paper wasp with green plans
in a rolled leaf
*
branch almost fully
turbanned by the wasp nest –
one apple protrudes
~ Richard Stevenson
Richard Stevenson teaches English and Creative Writing at Lethbridge College. Recent books include Parrot With Tourette’s (Black Moss, Palm Poets Series, 2006), Bye Bye Blackbird (Ekstasis Editions, 2007) (both poetry titles), and […]
