Genesis

Everything Has It's Beginning.
this poem has it's genesis on a monday night
11:30
walking down the street
with just a few speeding cars
for company

i have just finished reading andrea gibson's blue blanket for maybe the 50th time
wishing that i could wave my pain into metaphors like she can
with the effortless ease that her mother's mothers
wove thread into cloth to clothe their children their husbands and then themselves

i feel the only thing i have to write about
is my own inability to feel something to write a poem about
and i think My God! am i to spend the rest of my life writing poetry about poetry?

still walking i pull out my notebook
i flip through the pages
one eye paying only half of it's attention to where i am going
the rest and the other take in these scratched out remnants of poems that never were
incomplete works i pray
do not one day
become metaphors for my life

i stop at the page dated october 7 2007
two words stand on the top of the page
"My Father"
the rest is blank
because what can you say about a man you do not know?

my father and i never talk
never share our stories and i know
this is because his father and his father's father never really talked to their sons they were too busy worrying about the farm and the mortgage and griping about the goddamn liberals in ottawa trying to mess everything up

i think
put my notebook away
the cars are still going past
and i am still quiet

my father does not have a farm
or a plow
or a mortgage
he has a a motorcycle and a backyard
and maybe that's why he was ale to hold me while i cried after my mother asked me if the reason i didn't go to church was because i thought i was gay
and tell me he loved me
and was proud
of me

i remember now that my father once wrote my mother a poem
and that it was the clearest expression of love i have read

Everything Has A Beginning
my Father was mine.

She was a star.
Every saturday,
Monday,
Wednesday afternoon,
She would walk,
With her ball in a worn
   but clean
Leather bag,
The few blocks to the alley
And she would join the ladies
At the league. 

I didn't know that
She was a star.
I knew she played
But I saw her name
On a plaque

Your Hair Is A Metaphor

When your hair sticks out like that
To one side, along the edge
Like the sharp edge of my desk
Which I'm always hitting my knee on
You kind of remind me of old pictures
Of my grandfather, now late
He was harder
More worn
Not like your soft carelessness
and he had on an old warn stetson
which should have fallen apart years ago
if not for the dust of a hundred head of sheep
holding it together
tying him to his home and his profession
You smile
slightly cocky and definitely embarrassed
as I reach up to try and fix it
disturbed by the thought that I might fall in love with my reincarnated granfather
I wonder if he had that same smile
When my grandmother first reached up
To fix his

There's something about you
It's not how you look
Or how you act
Or how you treat me
No
I think it's your money
You've got a lot
And you give me some.

I like your money
But don't tell anyone

My friends wouldn't be too happy
If they found I was selling out
And settling
For your money

But your money buys me nice things
Like a clean place to live
And new clothing whenever I want it
Expensive food
Rare wine
Diamonds
But I like having a clean place most
Because I don't have to clean it
Maria does.

I could go back home
With my mother
She wants me back anyway
And she'd talk to me at night
And not expect me to smile
And put on a brave face
And flirt with the foreign oil tycoon
When I'm not happy
And just want to cuddle with you and eat ice cream

Mum's her place isn't very clean though
And Maria probably would only come over for half an hour on sundays
But only if I babysat her kids