Helenium in Courtenay

last-minute flare-ups

before the damping down,

a guttering bushfire

of orange flower-heads,

going up in smoke,

at odds with

the gravitational

down-drag of earth,

the erotic

uplift of sun …

and, drooping,

failing,

charred already at heart.

That's how

your Vancouver Island garden looked,

when you showed me

where you'd put

your mother's ashes, Tom,

among smouldering helenium

all those air-miles from home.

Home

is where removal men transport belongings to but not

where you belong. Tell me, you sometimes write,

what's happening back home.

It's the down-drag of earth to where we begin, streets left behind,

where first we learn how hard it is to love, the ground of betrayals,

and loyalties, the womb we wormed our way out of. It is

the cramped house you brought her ashes from, the now

tenantless room, its owlish clock, photo frames, its rented

television set, in which they found her huddled

in the final broaching of her blood.

Final Arrangements

Two years ago you came

to make the arrangements,

kipping on our settee,

bags slung for the nonce

(rattling vitamin pills,

crumpled changes of shirt)

on my bedroom floor,

It didn't occur to me to ask,

till you were leaving, where

you'd kept her. Then you confessed,

before you both took flight

for Canada, that I'd

been sleeping with

your mother for three nights,

I admit I used

to fancy her as someone who

might just outlive us or

even perhaps fulfil the hope

one human creature could at least

(there must be odds)

live forever, never die,

this because

I loved her

and envied her longevity,

the tartness of her wit,

because

I wished it fervently.

The Leaving of Liverpool

Talk of a diaspora! All those friends of ours education took

abroad. Yet they were only doing what this restless city's

always done: ship out its men in the hardihood of voyaging,

souls assailed and soiled by longing, guilt, smelling wind

for landfall, wanting home, then, out of pocket, clambering

kit-bagged back up gangways, jostling on companionways,

bunking down, impatient for the screw to turn.