Modern Love

Poetry, 1990, Black Moss Press, Windsor

Modern Love is an exploration of love, death and landscape, in a series of lyrics, elegies and landscape meditations. the collection consists of several long poems and many short lyrics combining ceremonial forms with prose rhythms.

Many of these poems celebrate particular landscapes and the beloved who is lost, so that the landscapes themselves come to embody both what was and what is gone. Romance and betrayal, mortality and history, the truth in dreams, the disorder of the natural, are the subjects of these eclogues.

/

Listen:

/

Read:

Listen — it

happened again

not then,

      not last night,

this morning:

You’re a tonic, a rush, a cool breeze,

      a gentle caress,

a moment’s flush.

No–that’s wrong.

I know what you are:

You’re one of Doe Kelly’s nostrums–

made millions peddling you

all over Canada

    (they say he had a golden tongue)

Maybe you’re a

mountain stream, carrot soup

cauliflower with caraway.

I’ll tell you what

I’ll give up all equivalents

immediately

        and say

that

    when a naked cheek

turns up

      to meet

the small rain

      it is spring,

        it is you.