We’ve come to expect earthquakes, fires, hurricanes,
and tidal waves from our whitecoated brothers
whose laboratories shed radiation

Alexander, first over the wall,
collapsed battered by stones. Instantly
the Macedonian companions
gathered their shields over his body

Mime the loud wind in pain—
The worded room will yield
Your canny agony

On the third floor
I urinate into a white bowl
hearing cars on Taber Avenue

Needled by the notion that a poet should know
      reality

in the swirling there is some meaning that draws me
without specific reference I’m saying to her vagina

It was about seven or eight years ago.
It was between the portly three-storey white house
and the faded red shed behind the lettuce patch.

Times when the mountain is not here
except as the bells of cattle grazing
in the fog, or higher up, on the tropical side,

With magazines that give the latest medical advice:
“Do patients want to think it was genetic?
Or luck; or what they drank, lounging in the sun?”

A cloche in plum,
In lion marigold,
Or mannish toques; a Borsalino. Bring