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Though I with strange desire To kiss those rosy lips am set on fire, Yet will I cease to crave Sweet touches in such store, As he who long before From Lesbia them in thousands did receive. Heart mine, but once me kiss, And I by that sweet bliss Even swear to cease you to importune more; Poor one no number is; Another word of me ye shall not hear After one kiss, but still one kiss, my dear.

Every city in America is approached through a work of art, usually a bridge but sometimes a road that curves underneath or drops down from the sky. Pittsburgh has a tunnel— you don’t know it—that takes you through the rivers and under the burning hills. I went there to cry in the woods or carry my heavy bicycle through fire and flood. Some have little parks— San Francisco has a park. Albuquerque is beautiful from a distance; it is purple at five in the evening. New York is Egyptian, especially from the little rise on the hill at 14-C; it has twelve entrances like the body of Jesus, and Easton, where I lived, has two small floating bridges in front of it that brought me in and out. I said good-bye to them both when I was 57. I’m reading Joseph Wood Krutch again—the second time. I love how he lived in the desert. I’m looking at the skull of Georgia O’Keeffe. I’m kissing Stieglitz good-bye. He was a city, Stieglitz was truly a city in every sense of the word; he wore a library across his chest; he had a church on his knees. I’m kissing him good-bye; he was, for me, the last true city; after him there were only overpasses and shopping centers, little enclaves here and there, a skyscraper with nothing near it, maybe a meaningless turf where whores couldn’t even walk, where nobody sits, where nobody either lies or runs; either that or some pure desert: a lizard under a boojum, a flower sucking the water out of a rock. What is the life of sadness worth, the bookstores lost, the drugstores buried, a man with a stick turning the bricks up, numbering the shards, dream twenty-one, dream twenty-two. I left with a glass of tears, a little artistic vial. I put it in my leather pockets next to my flask of Scotch, my golden knife and my keys, my joyful poems and my T-shirts. Stieglitz is there beside his famous number; there is smoke and fire above his head; some bowlegged painter is whispering in his ear; some lady-in-waiting is taking down his words. I’m kissing Stieglitz good-bye, my arms are wrapped around him, his photos are making me cry; we’re walking down Fifth Avenue; we’re looking for a pencil; there is a girl standing against the wall—I’m shaking now when I think of her; there are two buildings, one is in blackness, there is a dying poplar; there is a light on the meadow; there is a man on a sagging porch. I would have believed in everything.

For my grandmother I am water, only because you are the ocean. We are here, only because old leaves have been falling. A mulching of memories folding into buried hands. The cliffs we learn to edge. The tree trunk hollowed, humming. I am a tongue, only because you are the body planting stories with thumb. Soil crumbs cling to your knees. Small stacks of empty clay pots dreaming. I am an air plant suspended, only because you are the trunk I cling to. I am the milky fish eye, only because it’s your favorite. Even the sound you make when your lips kiss the opelu socket is a mo‘olelo. A slipper is lost in the yard. A haku lei is chilling in the icebox. I am a cup for feathers, only because you want to fill the hours. I am a turning wrist, only because you left the hose on. Heliconias are singing underwater. Beetles are floating across the yard.

The fork lived with the knife and found it hard — for years took nicks and scratches, not to mention cuts. She who took tedium by the ears: nonforthcoming pickles, defiant stretched-out lettuce, sauce-gooed particles. He who came down whack. His conversation, even, edged. Lying beside him in the drawer she formed a crazy patina. The seasons stacked — melons, succeeded by cured pork. He dulled; he was a dull knife, while she was, after all, a fork.

Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations We are things of dry hours and the involuntary plan, Grayed in, and gray. “Dream” makes a giddy sound, not strong Like “rent,” “feeding a wife,” “satisfying a man.” But could a dream send up through onion fumes Its white and violet, fight with fried potatoes And yesterday’s garbage ripening in the hall, Flutter, or sing an aria aria an elaborate song for one voice with orchestral accompaniment, appearing most often in opera (“aria” means “air” in Italian). down these rooms Even if we were willing to let it in, Had time to warm it, keep it very clean, Anticipate a message, let it begin? We wonder. But not well! not for a minute! Since Number Five is out of the bathroom now, We think of lukewarm water, hope to get in it.

Today I watched a boy fly his kite. It didn’t crackle in the wind – but gave out a barely perceptible hum. At a certain height, I’d swear I heard it sing. He could make it climb in any wind; could crank those angles up, make it veer with the precision of an insect targeting a sting; then he’d let it roil in rapturous finesse, a tiny bird in mid-air courtship. When lightning cracked across the cliff – (like quick pale flicks of yak-hair fly-whisks) – he stayed steady. For so long he kept his arms up, as if he knew he’d hoist that kite enough. I asked if it was made of special silk, if he used some particular string – and what he’d heard while holding it. He looked at me from a distance, then asked about my alms bowl, my robes, and about that for which a monk lives. It was then I saw I could tell him nothing in the cohort wind, that didn’t sound illusory.

Come March we’d find them In the five-and-dimes, Furled tighter than umbrellas About their slats, the air In an undertow above us Like weather on the maps. We’d play out lines Of kite string, tugging against The bucking sideways flights. Readied for assembly, I’d arc the tensed keel of balsa Into place against the crosspiece, Feeling the paper snap Tautly as a sheet, then lift The almost weightless body Up to where it hauled me Trolling into the winds— Knotted bows like vertebrae Flashing among fields Of light. Why ruin it By recalling the aftermaths? Kites gone down in tatters, Kites fraying like flotsam From the tops of the trees.

Complete in ourselves, we look like scraps of paper anyway: left alone, we could tell our mothers and one another our owners’ flimsiest secrets and play together all day until we became intertwined, which is why you try to keep us permanently apart. One of us is a gossamer pirate ship, a frigate whose rigging the industrial sunset highlights, sail by oblong sail. Another resembles a Greek letter —gamma, or lambda; others still a ligature, a propeller, a fat lip. Our will is not exactly the wind’s will. Underlined by sand, whose modes of coagulation and cohabitation none of the human pedestrians understand, we take off on our almost arbitrarily lengthy singletons of string towards the unattainable, scarily lofty realm of hawk and albatross and stay, backlit by cirrocumulus. It seems to be up to you to keep us up in the air, and to make sure our paths never cross.

For Judy Williams Fraser 1963-69 I lived on the corner of Yew & York on the 2nd floor above  a corner store with my sister Leni  & boyfriend soon to be husband Neap  Hoover her friend Jo-Ann Huffman & her boyfriend Mike Sawyer then  Elsa Young  (just left Robert who was with Maxine) who met her lover Jack Wise next door then my sister Mary and my boyfriend  soon to be (later to unbe) husband Cliff Andstein below us bill bissett & martina & oolya  then painter-jogger  Gordon Payne & Merrilyn  (who becomes my friend later)  then bill again then Gordon again next to us Bing Thom, Jay Bancroft & often Marian Penner, Rick Clarke across the landing John and Susan Newlove & children fathered by gerry gilbert later the Ridgeways and next to them directly opposite us: Gerry Geisler (New Design Gallery) and Helen Sturdy & children our kitchen faced theirs apple pies in my oven & stew or toast in theirs we cd smell everything like the time we fell asleep as pork hocks simmered in my big red pot charred and burned almost caught on fire would have if Gerry hadnt woken us up and that building a total tinderbox always worried bill wd start one my bedroom / study faced the Molson’s sign and Burrard Street Bridge and I could watch the west end and highrises and planetarium grow and white sheets on a clothesline across the street dry as I’d sit at my bay window and write and mark on a smooth board cut to fit exactly the sill I’d glance up and see people like  you  &  Jamie  &  Carol  &  Joan  &  Marcia  & the Trumans and the Gadds  and the Lathams  and Lanny Beckman walking up and down Yew Street open the window & shout drop by on your way back dropping by everybody did it days filled with coffee, tea, poetry, cigarette smoke crises, trips, talkedy talk talk painting hard edged  strong coloured also  intricate silver point mandalas and collages a gallon of Calogna Red one summery Saturday night became a party of 100 or even more dancing in my bedroom to one music on a tape recorder dancing in the other to another drumming in the kitchen talking in the room with the blue-tile fireplace so many bodies I couldnt hear the music from  inside the  hallway just saw the taller heads moving together to different beats in almost darkness that crazy night at the Wahs’ place if that wasnt a party of this kind everybody landing on that bed everybody kissing everybody we had to go outside to pee because the lineup for the can so long somehow to do with that small space that it was so tight that everybody had to rub every body simply to go anywhere It was gorgeous after the Vancouver Poetry Conference (1963) Roy Kiyooka started dropping by   when he left his studio there’d always be a light on somewhere in our building and he could visit  any of us separately or clustered one time he told me he had a painting he wanted to give me but it was big and heavy he borrowed a truck and someone helped him up the dusty always dirty long stairs with Hoarfrost which we hung on a wall in a room just big enough to hold my round oak table (used to be Bowerings’ they bought a whole household of furniture for $80 and when they moved they gave it to Joan and then when she moved she stored it with me) a wall that later Elsa and I tore apart with a screwdriver and hammer shouting angry hexes at Robert all the way after and during that conference-- Olson, Creeley, Duncan, Levertov, Avison, Whalen, Ginsberg-- Roy and I became friends and there were readings in my room every second Sunday red cast iron pot full of bean soup, corn chowder, spicey meatball vegetable stew simmering and then cheese scones in the oven people would come and read their new work one week and the next week there’d be a Tish meeting with Daphne Marlatt, Dan MacLeod, Pete Auxier, David Cull & David Dawson rent $60 a month didnt change and some years it was cold the wind so cold on side facing the North Shore that Hydro was $60 per month and that wall frozen behind my pillows the police were something else they felt they had a right to question anybody so Cliff would be up at the laundromat on 4th or at Jackson’s to get some hamburger and be walking back with an economics book in one hand and meat wrapped in brown paper in the other and they’d stop him and ask him what he was doing and my friend Ray Wargo would get stopped almost every second time he’d drop in to visit where are you going and why and how long will you be someone was always getting busted someone was always tripping out someone was always visiting from   or going to  Europe or Japan here is a journal entry on June 9: evening of the first ever national leaders debate on TV “I am looking forward to seeing Trudeau--hope he gets pushed into/onto answering more directly than he has in the past. I, like many others including every gay man I know, do have a crush on him: he has much more style than any Canadian politician so far. I mean style in the true sense of the word, it is him, not affected… Cliff, of course, doesn’t trust him at all and thinks he’s a sell- out. I don’t go that far, yet. But I do think that compromising is the only way a politician can work this country and I do not like all the PR, razzmatazz, fundraising, and allegiances that go into just getting elected: our system seems to be based on gullibility…” coming home at night up Yew Street whether from downtown or the beach or Paul the butcher’s or Elsie the baker’s I loved looking up at my North-facing windows goldy  gold  mesh curtains light filtering through so warm  and so inviting

not straight, but in waves It seems every advance in the process deepens the subject’s relations to inner objects, happiness in regaining them after feeling adrift and lost, an increased trust because they appear good and helpful after all, as in the child step by step, building his relations to external objects, gaining not only from things pleasant, but from ways in which the child overcomes frustrations . . . Mrs. A, for instance: finally walking down familiar streets with a friend: an attempt at old bonds. Yet moments into the stroll the number of bustling people is too much, the buildings strange, the sunlight artificial, bleak . . . so that she has to retreat indoors into a restaurant for a chair, but even there the walls are buckling, the diners and waiters blurred— indifferent to what she carries inside, her home suddenly the only tolerable place— pictures of her boy, his drawings, in each and every room.