Ann’s books are:
The Last Thing Standing
The Mansfield Press
25 Mansfield Avenue
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
M6J 2A9
Phone: 416-532-2086
e-mail: [email protected]
and
Crossroads Cant available from
Broken Jaw Press, 1997.
Box 596 Stn A,
Fredericton NB E3B 5A6, Canada
Phone/fax: 506 454-5127
www.brokenjaw.com
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Books available from www.chapters.ca
The Last Thing Standing
Crossroads Cant
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For more Poets
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Ann’s participation in Scream in High Park
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Photo by Gayle Irwin, all rights reserved.
**
I’ll heed your wars less and less
internal gashes in the fold of
scrambled channels pockmarked
from diseases in those countries
you never go to but once gone
it remains in your blood.
peel me, wrap those sores
with scriptures affirming not gods
but an other whose mild face
has seen your worst night still
envisioning ceasefire dawns
eyes unclosed blood insists
that we as all life
go on. ridiculous
and weighty.
could I dwindle in fits of
amnesia. hold your hand
through our worst corridors’
walls whose muffled reports
promise more
life and death.
* *
caustic rust in pores awakening
the sun eats history, ephemeral
repetitive diurnal yearnings
polluting our streams of kissing
awake in small corners where
the monolithic
rolls over and dies
or simply rolls over with
glacial immensity.
the sun shines its millions
and smooth pat erases all
traces we have what our bodies
remember: shadows, the puncture
of tin glass and beads, toothpicks
for forests, kids’ voices, a handful
of multitudes swimming in Ganges’
doubly blessed shit and sacrament.
a tin lid scratches your arm
beads of blood
awakening pain.
* *
fissured red
blessures I receive the finest
bomb closed down
for the night. the latest
numbers are high, wondering
can we ever replenish
what we have lost.
a simple trip and a child’s
ankle is a universe
of pain. flesh of my flesh
one day i will swell with
hope contained in the jest
that two people can somehow
make one
* *
o lo soul
on the horizonmost point
where the last singers
sang their psalms
the tune lingers
tho the words have gone
can we welcome
first impulse
and say all else
is timelapsed
collapse of petals
palm and fingers
casting stones low
to skip numerous
lakes and finally, to surrender
fall in where horizons can’t go
but you or I amble freely
while struggling for breath
we catch fish with teeth
and exhale
oceans of solitude
draw the line for me
love, compare horizons
