City II.2.iv — Flirtations of light
Rocks
scattered, broken on its
wheel, warming to sun’s wash
across their face is
as enlightened as
it gets
They swell
and hum
in stone-specific key
for ages
The city hears it
in crushed bones and up
through layers of accumulated
death
Does it buzz?
Is it
a beat in angel-thrummed
bridge wire? Morning kisses
and blushes
Bursting in another
direction toward earth
thrill, opening chosen in midst
of each habit
Snow
drops first,
then tulips, then
riot of shape and hew
petal-specific, fragrance passes
as reality once calculable
illusions are left in the dust
of city’s dream of dawn’s
kiss
How romantic is that, though
questions remain — where’s
are, who’s here, what’s
we?
Getting to the arena on time
for example. And as Jack said
the Air Force Academy
Digest
that. Disposing of errant intrusions
of uncomfortable disposition
may obscure the question
but it lingers in moonlight’s foreshadowing
new nights in which night
disappears
discontinuous
shadow discriminations, leave
day loose among its bearings bringing
down the house of alternate
hands in a clamour of crashing
vanities of time and space
Whisper
of water and stone is neither
name nor
outcome, but that doesn’t mean
it can’t be heard in time between
time’s tapping out unlikely
licks. Sheer vibratory overload
hums trajectories – trajections, really,
story’s arc, costly delusion
economies
this together has brought
into law
of horizon’s subtraction
The law
of horizon’s subtraction doesn’t
hum, more of a drone, sound
of leaden with gratuitous
overtones to lend
a blush to semblance
of alive
The Air Force
Academy remains the joker
ubiquitous sign of not just limit
but eventual embrace necessary
to resuscitation of transparent
medium as a vehicle for open
horizons to possible reach
into edge
Beyond is another
matter displacing misleading
metaphors but refusing to budge
from top of the sentence
still promising a period
It’s all
so clear until the city
enters through back
door resembles nothing
so much as familiar
turn of phrase
What is the colour
of stars and what happened to terraces
as determinants of urban splendour
take us to new encounter
with question of remains
clinging to flirtation which assumes
an aura of uneasy
sanctity
Then the Air Force
Academy glows well beyond
antithetical absence and hums
a few bars of
off we go
into the wild blue yonder
before admonishing
bound earth
fantasies to give it up
Dictation
is another name for that as it
leaves Yankee rock piles
trying to catch wheels spinning
madly down the road and reeling
from metaphor to mixed
metaphor
Giving it a name
flirts, a brush
of light on neck’s curve or glass
tower’s face
and if Martians land
in the sentence, it’s because
invasions happen and only a fool
would say no
No, not a fool
who is another name for it
but a hunger
artist starving for the glory
of pain bound refusal buttressed hard
case anthem
In the second town
Martians walk down Bloor
and no one thinks twice about loon
call rings the air out
of blue to new attention
Michael Boughn was described in the Globe and Mail as “an obscure, veteran poet with a history of being overlooked.” He spends much of his time in hockey arenas in dubious corners of Toronto.