Sono Nis Press, 1982. ISBN: 0-9192 03-07-X, 6 x 9, 99 pages. $5.95

Lyric poetry. The haunting presence of an ancient land.

He is a poet who shrewdly travels to the ends of his metaphors. Laurie Ricou, The Vancouver Sun

THE MILL

I

In a fluid darkness
bent by stars,
all direct lines
are curves of stone
cracking on the river bottom,
shudders of light
learning wetness, flesh,
stone turned inward
to learn the hardness inside stone.

I held this truth once.
Do you want truth?
Myself, I have stopped
asking for truth
but ask for simplicity
and it confounds me.

We fall, staright, hard,
into the sun of where we’ve been,
and come out flesh,
not space, but yielding stone, earth.
It is a flying leap.

I have walked
the great gravel bars,
I have lain in the black furrows
as the cold came up,
I have watched the dusk
come up, stood silent
at the first shivering star.

My year is a restless
pushing at skin
until I can lie
on the frozen earth.
For spring, also, must learn
from where it comes,
another truth.

II

Beside me runs the river,
its flow cloudy with loess.
I sit on sand and stones
and begin again.
I reach to learn anything,
to learn why we tremble
in the pale light,
the air too clear,
and yet too murky
for me to see or hear more
than my own earth.

How far have we come or gone?
It is cold.
I throw a stone into the current.
It drifts.
What is time to us?
We are time,
the most difficult answer.

First star of night,
millwheel, I have come
to learn something from myself,
or—I have come here
to forget myself again.
Star, we have gone the different ways
of differing flesh
and yet still must speak
to one another.
There is nothing else.
We have come through
another year and know even less.
We have forgotten
our deepest names.

The leaf falls; the body rots;
the moments end.
This is not a truth
but something every man
must stand against
in his own time.
Hard knowledge:
only love brings life
to fallow flesh.
Such simplicity confounds me.