hoarder she doesn’t get it, this noxious undergrowth of plastic bags and containers boxes, guitar strings, magazines bottles, business cards beneath sinks, in closets, drawers but all the hands careful and careless as those of inconstant lovers that touched these things and my plan to master a craft needing endless bags, et cetera while there is despair to them as if they know they’ll never be unearthed to second life in antique stores or museums and my sense each yielding of thing as of person prepares that parting at which you can’t hold anything or anyone vagrant raining to beat hell - under garage eaves on the light over the door it huddles not quite the picture in the bird-book: too plump with feathers puffed up somehow - for warmth maybe, a thousand miles from the tropics on a perch out of the rain crouching though, head down he is spied: a large magpie, plumed natty as the rest, swoops down and scares him off - struts and stares on the light then back to his perch high in the trees magpies have their case: they were here first and you let in one, next it’s a hundred still, you can tell he enjoyed that vagrant: a stray bird far from its normal ecological range last night’s storm left crab-apple and cherry petals spattered over the patio like confetti around church-steps Sunday morning I’d never seen a wedding just flowery cars honking and those festive full-stops littered, damp with dew or rain on concrete and earth the peonies hang their heads at a puddle’s edge a lilac scrag dries in the sun like some dead thing on the shore honour in memoriam S. L. you eyed each grab and punch till I tasted your brother’s fist, blood and damp earth - when you stepped in, grim as your school-play MacDuff: never hit a man when he’s down soon your family moved - a hundred miles and two years out of mind, when the paper said you’d been hitch-hiking home, the body found in Burwell Harbour time enough, two years to join the heroes in a child’s ever-after unemployed this white-haired editor at Dominion House as agreed too polite to see I’m angling for the ghost of a long-gone job - though he allows these kids are good with their journalism degrees travel pieces he says they sell I don’t travel much I say he draws back wide-eyed - you don’t have to GO anywhere we swap beers swill stories then maybe I should stay meet the philosophical welder the dour professor drink and talk go down easy - I’m asked back for next Friday and the next - before last call promises are warm possibility forever but in the bus-stop air fall’s first nip - truth is I’m out ten-fifteen bucks for my rounds – a small price for friendship but too much last bus gone I button my jacket turn up my collar start walking
Biographical Statement
James Thurgood was born in Nova Scotia, grew up in Windsor, Ontario, and now lives in Calgary, Alberta. He has been a labourer, musician, and teacher – not necessarily in that order. His poems have appeared in various journals, anthologies, and in a collection (Icemen/Stoneghosts, Penumbra Press). He is also the author of His Own Misfortune, a work-in-progress. (James A. Thurgood’s Word Salad)