Birthday Haibun ('Navreh')

 "Do you guys ever fight?"

I used to say no back when our bodies were separated by geography and immigration law - we were bubblewrapped in yearning, immune to irritation, every video call a gift. These pandemic days, the mundanity of unwashed dishes and laundry is incessant, like running water. We went from long distance to being quarantined together, and friction is inevitable. Yet every day I pinch myself awake, afraid for the first few seconds of wakefulness that I shall find a discharged phone next to me in bed instead of your sleepy form bathed in morning light. I tumble down a hill with you at the speed of life, nursing minor cuts but joyously alive, for the first time in forever. 

nursing pink sunburns

with pleasure; after winter

fiery spring days

Lycanthropy (a glosa)

as he and the dog plod, side by side, out of the city

into cityless time—the reliquary forest still cached

with ancestral smells, where the reviving man and

would-be wolf (loping ahead, nose low, feverishly

(from Run With Her by Steven Heighton)

The Honourable British East India Company men

are vulnerable to silver - Sir Thomas Roe 

decides that the future lay across the ocean,

as he and his dog plod, side by side, out of the cities

of the Genteelest of Britains into untamed land.

The transformation of the British man

occurs the minute he invades on horseback, from timeless cities

into cityless time—the reliquary forest still cached

with sacred peace—he descends his white horse

and eats it, falls to all fours, and writhes with bloodthirst

bent on swallowing every drop of incense from land laden

with ancestral smells, where the reviving man and

native woman lose the next three hundred years to a

would-be wolf - loping ahead, nose low, feverish.

tomorrow fades in dreams of pages (a villanelle)

The days go on and on for ages,

Every evening a tiny Sunday.

Tomorrow fades in dreams of pages.

Words and syllables leak into beds

Staining night sheets a satin blue.

But the days go on and on for ages.

Reading between lines for worlds that invite

every night to dip into fables.

And tomorrow fades in dreams of pages.

Bound to one life, finding

furtive freedom in fiction, where

the days can go on and on for ages

and the evenings have not sapped me

of rest, where there is meaning still, and

tomorrow has not faded in reams

of pages of newsprint and wages

that have to be wrought, but alas!

The ageless days go on and on,

and tomorrows merge into a marathon.

the first (a sestina)

after Bread by Michael Crummey: https://canpoetry.library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/crummey/poem6.htm

The first of something is precious. I

signed a lease with a lover,

entwined signatures, and made trips to IKEA for plants

and shelves and our first sack

of flour. She brought her ukulele

and old books

to replace my newer books.

The days now all taste the same: I

brew morning bitterness and strum ukuleles

while my greying lover

crosses out lists on a trifecta of screens; daily sack

of emotions transplanted

to tomorrow. But every day still plants

a first of something. This poem on this notebook

or burnt toast this particular shade of burlap-sack

is new. Every day rhymes but I

have never told my lover that I love her

at this precise second, playing a song on her ukulele

that sounds like every other love song on every other ukulele.

Every year snow falls in Vancouver, supplanting

gloom with magic, yet we can never predict when to don pullovers -

whether we’ll be caught inside bookstores

when the snow begins to drift down lazily, or if you and I

will have hit the sack

after a dinner of rotis and conversation, denting the sack

of flour we bought when you brought your ukulele

over from another country, when you and I

began a new life of plants

and books and lowered

angst (the slow burn that comes with long-distance loving).

Every day is the same and every day is new. I brought you a sack

of flowers for Valentine. Do you remember? Several years ago we booked

a vacation in Oahu, where we found this ukulele

in a reserve for tropical plants

and today, here we are, locked together. You and I

have been Facebook Messenger lovers

for so long that every night I remember that poem on flour sacks

and am grateful for ukuleles and slow plants.