Hades

From 4 AM on,
We’d sweat, underpaid, 
in an understaffed
bakery.

He was the bread guy.
I made the pastries.
To pass time,
we’d talk

about bosses,
	who were anything but
banter on news
between passing utensils. 

Reaching a ten-pound whisk
across the table 
he said,
“Here’s a whip for your icining.”

Until then, he had been
describing coverage
of an earthquake
“Down in Hades.”

We spoke in yells.
Tiled walls shook 
with eighty-quart mixers.
The stereo crackled,

“…She fuck me like she Haitian…”
	What odds?
I said I wonder
what Haitian women fuck like.

He lied that maybe he’d tell me
after his family 
trip to Dominican, smiling,
“It’s right next door.”

Since I quit,
he works the big whip
The bosses made him
the pastry guy.
Cowboy Kindred

He was standing outside the liquor store, looking lost
in time. A nod to a bygone era that left, like a 
one-night stand he thought was the one
but snuck off sometime before morning.

The shaking head and agape mouth sold me.

He looked to be in his mid-fifties 
in cowboy boots, ripped jeans, a tank top,
and aviators, with long bleached curls 
beneath a straw Corona hat.
	
His steroidal arms, tanned and hairy up the bicep,
bore tattoos I can’t remember. He had a 1980s
pro-wrestler-like quality, like Dog the Bounty Hunter, 
in the clothes of Kenny Chesney.

As I approached the entrance, an electric CUV
whirred past us. Though there were others, 
he looked at me, someone to whom he sensed 
he could speak. He said:

“I remember when cars sounded like cars. 
These fucking things sound like spaceships.”
To drive the point home, he trilled his lips,
bbbrrrrr, then waved both arms in defeat.
I laughed. He shook his head humorlessly.

I wonder if he’s composing a poem now
about a hard-luck case whose expression
read lost, like a guy who’d missed his stop,
avoiding sincerity in a liquor store parking lot.



Song of Domesticity
My neighbour’s window plays
the clatter of stacked plates,
an accordion of forks
chiming into place.

I don’t know if it’s music
preceding a quiet evening
or silence that succeeds 
the absence of ketchup.

It’s thirty degrees.
If the dog in the driveway’s
chain could reach the shade
of my neighbour’s lifted pickup

he could sleep with the filthy,
silhouetted women, who flap 
beneath Browning bumper stickers,
never breathing a word.



Peg Ride

For my last dance with ego,
I’ll wish not to be dispatched
to the back of a Chrysler
mini-van hearse, ferried by some
Charon in budget coattails
listening to car salesmen—
when he breaks from humming 
along to exhausted CanCon
that predates and outlasts me,
while dreaming of a used Chevy—
unmindful of the dead guy’s 
peg ride to oblivion.



16
I’ve committed to her body
as an archaeologist commits to a crypt
crawling through his fantasy
eyes rounded, fascinated by the study

or as an old-world tribesman’s tattooed face
marks idolatry, obsession,
a commitment to her sovereignty;
like the letters on my cheek.

I’ve heard colleagues’ repudiations—
bitter, lonesome men, cynical
as their tropes are predictable:
One pussy; the ol’ ball ‘n’ chain…

I once penetrated her with a bottle of Spumante
that tasted sweeter than any Champagne
that same year we had sex on the train
passing scenic blurs in New Brunswick or Quebec

Those short, counting years tarnished dark
as Petite Sirah. I savour her scent, 
swirl, our long finish. I’d quaff
a chalice of her plasma, both hands cupped.

Now, for the first time, I feel doubt—
or grief for my dead self—
hearing sometime this year,
she wants to break our old record.

My Bones
What I felt in my bones
is dead. 
Praise my fickle bones!
With a turnover rate
of ten years.

Farewell to certainties
I’ll soon forget.
Make way, old bones!
En garde!
I sense a new revelation.