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.
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Listen:
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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.