Three Poems from a Previous Life: Canada, circa 1993

Poem 1

The Narwhal
Markham Museum, Markham, Ontario

you’re not real        you’re
fiberglass and paint        whale-song-moaning
through climate-controlled museum air
filling empty bottles and shells
with the silt of history        your spiraled tusk
as lethal as the knight’s lance        as legend
as the unicorn’s horn         unreal
your great needle slid through the fabric
of frigid waters        burst through the broad nets
of incredulous fishermen        skewered any and all
disbelief in        God and sea monsters

Poem 2

The galleons rise,

prows moonward; buoyant bodies
sway in the sanguine waters with each contraction
of the heart. In every vessel, a captain

unrolls charts, calculates the distance
between us. The light from their lamps
threads through the portals, links mooring

ship to ship. The constellations they draw
differ from person to person: the howling
woman, the man of glass, the laughing dog.

The tide turns inside each of us.
Anchors raised, the ships drift from shore.

Poem 3

The Egg Illuminates*

In the midnight of the kitchen, the egg illuminates.
From an open box, a pearly radiance
billows; through an open window, the light

blankets fields sown dark with cricket song,
unrolls onward only to break
over the rim of insomnious cities.

warm the egg in the basket of your hands.

in the silence between breaths, heed
the tiny claw scratching against the shell, the fainest
of heartbeats beneath wet feathers.

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*This poem appeared previously in the Midwest Quarterly, Autumn 1996, Vol.XXXVIII, No.1