I've been writing poetry for over 60 years. Re-reading some of them, I think "That's not bad. Worth sharing, perhaps." So here are some of them. All poems Copyright W. E Kirchmeir.
Johannisnacht
The sun shoves ice from river mouths.
The mouths gape: a silence
Cries in the receding darkness,
Stains the weather.
Its memory like a dye
Colours the sudden knowledge
When spring rotates us
Into summer’s attitudes.
Though we kindle fires
In the shortest night
To confound the silence
With our fire’s light –
Though we silence silence
With the fire’s light
Kindled and deserted
In the shortest night
That silence stains
The sudden knowledge of ourselves
When spring rotates us
Into lovers’ attitudes.
(1965. Johannisnacht = St John’s Night)
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Haiku
Words float on the air
like smoke and dry leaves.
Memory fails me.
2019 08 13
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FILM CLIP
There’s a white cock
with a red comb
facing west
nailed to the barn
where leafless trees
cradle the wan
wintry sun
and rock it down
in love’s gentle arc
to the iron ground.
He gleams like stone
though painted wood
the red comb flames
as red combs should
but the cock never shows
though pointed west
which wind blows
the sun to rest.
Ca 1972.
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Imagine a bird
The backyard, mud and snow, sad grey-green grass.
Imagine a bird impossibly red in this monochrome landscape.
I remember a woman in a red coat
surrounded by schoolboys in blue blazers.
Words spill from me,
cadence and echo carving time.
I want to paint an impossibly red robin
ablaze in the dimming light.
2014-04-13
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There’s No History Here
Above Kama Bay
This country has no history,
they say.
Then what’s that breathing there?
There are no stories told
more than a generation old.
Musty papers in old libraries,
read by odd fellows
who believe they can rebuild the past.
Frail quilts stored on high dusty shelves,
brought out into bright air
and fingered by old women,
as they tell who pieced the patchwork,
who ran the needle through the batt,
made arcs and whorls that hold
the coverlet together.
These tales made up
of memories, misremembered
names and half-remembered facts –
they don’t make a history,
they say.
Nor do those fragments
of a myth the elders tell.
Oral history’s not history,
they say.
Each teller adds his notions
of what was truly done.
Each teller makes a tale
of what she knows must,
not might, have been.
And if these tales are true enough
(for truth in history’s a guess,
a fiction built on facts),
if then these tales are true,
as any history may be,
that doesn’t signify –
a generation or two back
is as far as memory
and memories of memories may reach.
The land seems empty,
the sound of the truck
working up the hill remote, muted
by the space enfolding it.
The ghosts of those who came before us
do not speak in the wind,
their language does not
echo in the water-filled canyons,
their songs have long since faded
into silent distances.
And yet
and yet.
Something moves behind me,
touches my neck.
Something like a word,
half heard,
catches my ears.
The heat seems loud as a shout,
the pines’ sweetness hangs
in the sun-stilled air –
There is history here.
There was history here.
What’s left of it –
a few flakes struck from stone
the rusty stain of blood
bleached
by indifferent rain and sun.
2013/06/06 to 2018/01/20
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Like Tears, Like Rain
Poems drop from her mouth
like tears
like rain
They wet the ground and the trees
and turn the sky on its head
So that we are walking on clouds
My loud thoughts fill my eyes
echo from the houses
and I don’t hear the fall
of her soft words
like rain
23 Feb 2000
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Love sonnetina
You can’t write a love sonnet these days.
Regular rhythm and rhyme are out of fashion.
Let line and subject wander any way
they want. You can’t limit passion
to fourteen lines. So they say.
Now memories of your skin and hair distract
me. Your eyes, blue and grey, recall skies of fall weather,
bounded by winter’s cool and distant pact
that defines our endings. We don’t know whether
in our encounters we should yield or act.
But either way, we know we’ll be undone
by love’s illusion that we will still be one.
2006 & 2013
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THE SEA SON'S EYES ARE BLUE AND GREEN
GOLDEN FISHES SWIM THEREIN
A poem for many voices
stars shape faces in his head burst
coalesce and grow like trees
an old man's face
looms in the branches see see his hair
entangled in the boughs see see his hair
entangled in the branches of anemones
stars burst on the rocking water
I am scattered over the water
my fragments are scattered over the water
my face is entangled in the pattern the waves make
I am reborn in every motion of the water
stars burst in the rocking water
he gathers them into his head they glitter
in the darkness they blaze like the sun
that shattered on the water and became stars
bursting in the sea son's head in silence
that touched the inside of his face
and grew like a tree
In that other place where these things happened
I sat me down by the waters of language and wept,
For behold, I had no face, my name was taken from me
And given to the wind.
[1973; publ. in 39 Below, Edmonton
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A Sonnet
I walk along the road, past fat fields and green,
past white houses drowsing blue-roofed in the sun,
across the river drifting past the reeds;
no footsteps mark where I have gone.
The land seems silent; no sound
of human action drifts across the air.
Birdsong alone encapsulates the wind,
self making, self-consuming, like wildfire.
My shadow lengthens. From the east
the wind receives its coldness like a gift.
The forest crouches like a beast.
Song, wind die down; what's left
is mere murmur of my heart, my breath
winding its way inside me like a death.
1999
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Listening to Eli
November 3, 1973, listening to Eli Mandel
"Rooting around in fragments of lost cultures...
Indian -- Eskimo -- Beothuk --
The land is history in Canada --
Geography is history in Canada --
We transfigure objects into myths..."
Incantatory list,
abstractions spelling desire into dream.
Saying what we wish we were
will not make us different,
will not change us.
Hand is hand; blood, blood;
the track in the dying leaves
shows where we were, where we are
(and elsewhere still, imprint in warm humus.)
II
Hear him chant, spell,
alter the shape of the air,
my tympanum, nerves --
I don't believe you.
You're rewriting me.
III
I am where it happens,
you don't see me
feel me
taste me
touch me
hear me
move me
nor yourself neither
I'm the seeing, I'm not eye
not the music, but
the shape of it
in, along the darkness
The shape's where in- and outside touch
I'm the shape of rock
left after ice has scratched
the mountain off it,
has carved shadow
I'm a shadow
with no body to be of
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