Leaving Taichung Station

 

bridges buckle in Parry Sound

“I imagine this midnight moment's forest:
Something else is alive…”--Hughes

as winter leans its elbow into the land’s groin

the white birch quiver and funny bones sigh 

in reverberation, the lake’s near-frozen proficiency cracks at 10

and desire darkens fury in a flurry of snow

the alabaster heart gone tin and the souls ondinging

while digging out from the sky's travel, words drift

a wrong turns up lost in the bend of a river

the misguided land formations and the raven’s outcrop 

along the bank, worn underwear washup pink in hawk feathers 

chipmunk bones wriggle in silent blankets

the world’s unknown unraveling through the skiff 

seeds scatter a speed boat cognition 

traveling in stealth, deer come stalking death

in the water, earlier you’d hoped to out race the Northern Pike

the vanity of four-legs against the velocity of a green fin

too fleet for a faulty stroke, you limber on 

closer to dog paddle and weakened genuflection 

né·ve known and cornsnow joining, wing

away the day spun, the osteology and scaffolding

in the welp of a lake, the terrain bitten by a drifting glacier

an age of ice, a fox’s stink a season ago

the snapping deciduous caught in the tongue of a November updraft

there you go

the questions and the revisions

what to do with the creek in the neck, creaking 

the cringe stiffened from watching language drift

uncertainty transformed from the queer, sultry summer¹

into winter’s frigid breath, the poem falling in shards

the heart, Suricata suricatta in defense of the sky

books come and go in the wash of fractals and limbs

all you penned on the boulders

or peed in the brackish pond

secrets you tucked into the slats of the bobbing dock

bravery buried in the back yard frozen 

from trunk and twig and promises, long ago

the sharks washed up in the garden as the suicide undressed

and your feet plugged sand, knee deep, into the green spawn and muck

and the bridge buckled from a human weight unbuttoned

the black rocks bellowing far below

the silence towed a collapsing body off the road
as you raced snow-pawed toward the thawing hearth

in the cabin in the dark, the mending gloam 

ardor dogged up in the mud after the thaw

and the land unbuckled

the cornsnow still aglow with silence

and we undressed our ribs, lock by lock

the endless revisions thumbprint the world you know

and the word

as snow blankets the extraneous stones and twigs

for you writer draw and untangle language from the ground

as the stars go unthinking and thought bows 

^1Plath