Rescue Cat
Through the worn gauze
of a lemon-white curtain
the glazed light of moon
falls on a dreaming man,
illuminates the face of a woman,
weary, adrift and soon
asleep beneath tussled blankets
while above the woman’s head
a tabby with tawney-black fur
nuzzles with affection,
paws the sleeper’s silvery hair,
stretches her legs, sighs with a purr.
What does it mean
to save one broken cat
for neither God nor the world will care,
only a sleeping old man,
his tender-souled wife
and the tabby cat touching her hair?
- Published in Tap Into Poetry magazine, November 2025
Friend, Most Erudite of Shades
It seems you’ve left us, friend,
(I found your obit in a database)
or rather took your leave three years ago,
thus passes one more kindly face.
You spoke of things that others
rarely care about – experience
and reason, how each should fit,
the church and quirky mystery
and the state of the Spirit in our times,
(something was about to fall
or had already, sadly, fallen),
zero and infinity
and what they have in common.
You need only write a bit
each day, you counselled me.
You had just been diagnosed with
Alzheimer’s the last time
we met for lunch, old friend,
and I might have guessed,
for the restaurant and address
you gave did not exist.
I found you wandering the street,
baffled and grievous
and led you to a coffee shop.
And yet the talk flowed as ever,
as did your lucid thought
and courage, not knowing if
to brace for madness or the sun.
And thus, my friend, you left
as go the old in these post-modern times.
When younger, I would have thought
that paltry obit unforgiveable, a crime,
for pipes and drumming band
should have mourned your passing.
I suppose we live too long today
and in the end fall leagues
from whatever flits by as fashion.
Thus, sit with me here a while,
my friend, most erudite of shades,
I will pour that sulphuric Highland Malt
you loved, open up the oyster can and
scrounge for crackers doused with salt.
We will laugh and toast the beauty
of all that can and must persist,
and there will be no mourning
as I know you would be first to so insist
for our brief run you said was merely
a microcosm of the solitary passage
of a single sun,
and of how we must learn to love
the shunned unlovable --
the place where wisdom has its start,
and the value of devoting time each day
to triumph in each our own, harmless,
(but never small) peculiar way.
- Published in Queen’s Quarterly, Summer 2024
More Poems...
Let Go of Summer
Let go the haunting trill of mourning dove
on waking, the hearty jaunt at dawn above the lake
and sun that splashes, darts among the trees.
Let go the lazy sizzle of eggs and bacon on
the grill, the early dip that chills one’s soul to life,
the moments for reflection, let go of these.
Let go the slow turning times on water,
drifting with a current, dreaming with a friend,
let go the cool diving lakes of afternoon,
the tennis courts, the summer partners who
live no longer than a season’s grace, then disappear;
let go of seaside souvenirs in sunny rooms.
Let go of evening’s laughter on the dock,
and brown-eyed girls who dance and sway
in lantern-lit pavilions beneath the moon.
These almost-auburn days of August grow oddly
brief, the evening’s chill sets early on the folding mist
and though winter’s sleep has yet to call
it one day will, and not far off, so let go of all
such things mixing misplaced memory with desire
and let summer gently slip like starlight into fall.
- Published in Academy Quarterly Review, Summer 2021
Star Travelers
We are all star travelers,
brief-lived, unknowing,
come hurtling through brute time
and boundless span,
riding an obscure star
which has before worlds began
coursed the reaches of 100
billion stars in all, sailing the
far frontiers of a galaxy
woven from the trance
of giant sun-wheels spinning
in fearsome, celestial dance.
Our guide and consolation
is a transient grace, insisting
that all exists for Now,
for this momentary bliss,
for those whom we adore
and perhaps a backwards kiss,
a transitory passing
like the slanting light at dusk
and on and on,
times without number more
this simple star must
revolve before star-spinning
spirals off to less than dust.
Spring Comes Singing like a Troubadour
“I swear,” says one who knows me well, “when the
angels were handing out ‘patience,’ you were lounging
behind this shed, drinking Scotch and daydreaming.”
Well, this is correct about the garden shed, for it is a
fine place to greet the spring as it billows in from the west
and illuminates the fields in freshly laundered light.
And note too how the spring wind announces itself --
less like a king and more like a troubadour, strumming and
singing a perennial tune, a melody we ache for
through all the months that are not the spring.
And as for a certain lack of patience – and here I’m putting
it mildly, for I have as much aptitude for patience as
I have for diesel mechanics or the flying trapeze,
meaning none, though now I am merely adrift in my thoughts,
for spring does this to folks on stray afternoons in
April, out here behind the garden shed, a bottle of
Famous Grouse on the grass and all concerns abandoned to
another day, enlivened by a warmth no soul has known
for months and thus what fault is impatience in this
land of oppressive winter, for today spring is dancing a jig on the
breeze and a melody is blowing our hearts clean apart.
- Selected by the League of Canadian Poets as the “Poetry Pause” poem for June 29, 2023
Sailing on the Danforth
The west is an ember-billowed glow
Where silver towers dream their dreams
But here the mist is rolling in
And corsairs from the evening shores
Sail sky-blue boats by Greek cafes
While drowned men wait in alleyways.
And I’m full sail and gliding free
A sailor racing home from sea
Full sail and swaggering down the street
The raw salt breeze in my face.
- Published in Queen’s Quarterly, Summer 1992
Cadillac Dreaming
On the morning of my daughter’s
birth my father touched down in
a Cadillac – sky-blue
and sleek-finned, irreductable, molecular
in essence and announced it had forever
been his dream to pilot
such a celestial beast on the occasions of his
elevation to grandfatherdom.
No one believed this
beatific vision, no one at all,
but looking back now
I see the inspiration of
Cadillacs in the creamy Impalas
and bottle-blue Buicks, in the balloon-
red Parisiennes
that had been my father’s
to acquire and sell year after
year, remembering in particular a panel
on a ‘57 Chevy so turquoise you
could swim through it to the sky.
My father’s Cadillac was a great star-
going galleon of pistons and silence;
he was the skipper; famous
down the Florida coast,
cruising over continents, and
hovering over days of toil
until finally he grew too old
for Cadillac dreaming
and auctioned the hulk for
four hundred dollars, saying that’s
an end to it. And so it was
for three weeks
when he emerged from the doors of
Cadillac II whose sheen and dimensions
were even more transcendent
than the first – a divine
transport of sensors and gauges.
From the summit of microchip Olympus
the old man computed his most recent
parsec per gallon. Then with seatbelts
secured, he flicked the antigravity.
The sparks flew like a benediction
and away he soared
to the shooting blue firmament.
- Published in Queen’s Quarterly, Summer 1992