Two Poems

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Brick

I

Put one brick on top of another

And soon you’ll have built

A wall.

II

Brick on my dresser

From Claybank Brick Plant;

Fire-brick of multitudes

Fought infernos in furnaces.

III

What is a brick but human violence

Sprung from Earth, raping Earth.

Raw matter forged into

Forms

As raw desire is forged into

Words.

IV

Is a brick a stone?

If you throw a brick through a window

Are you a hypocrite?

V

See sepia-stained men

Laying bricks for foundations

Of garish, Gilded Age banks.

Never to know thoughts

Or if they were paid.

Invisible grunts

Who built the world.

VI

If someone is so thick

As to name their child Brick

I would expect their head

To be as dense as lead.

VII

Mortar binds bricks in bonds unbreakable

As hot glue guns glean popsicle sticks into houses.

That is to say, susceptible

To the right kind of pressure.

VIII

That time you dropped a brick on your toe,

I kissed it.

IX

Etymologically

Brick is the progeny

Of brycke.

Those craftsmen of Amsterdam.

X

My brick is pocked, mottled

Black-brown over chalk-white

Like flatlands of White Sands.

XI

Orange makeup on sallow skin.

Perfumed wisps of hair hide bald

Empty skull.

You-Know-Who:

The Emperor of Unseem,

The brick through the establishment.

XII

What ever happened

To yellow brick road?

Yesterday I was skipping school,

Guzzling sudsy soda-pops.

Tonight I woke to the thud

Of my wife’s casket.

XIII

And so with my words I craft what I can,

Each thought a brick plucked from rivers of mud,

Not all sturdy, nor gold: I’m just a man.

Veins of Life

Basement detritus, albums of sediment wait to be uncovered by me, amateur chronologist. Searching begins with a blast of furnace heat as I cradle plastic like porous parchment. Cracked, blurred, black and white – veins of life. Great-Uncle Willie stands on a threshing machine swallowing wheat sheaves as dust flies from black soil, plumes rolling heavenward to blot out the sun. Strangers skate on homespun twilight ice: guffaws, gossip, rail ties rim the bulging surface where thirty-below sweat on skin froze faster than breath left the body. Give me Fick Farm, stone foundation barn, give me Clydesdales snorting, straining traces, rattling buggies rode to brick school inscribed 1920, show me births, birthdays, weddings, deaths in the vibrancy of the spectrum, no fuzzy, cardboard-coloured clippings patched with scotch tape. See absence of breath, touch cold, corporeal flesh, feel ache of bountiful stalks gone to seed – I want it all, want it now. But remember, you can’t kiss mist. Remember what a corpse looks like, stop elevating ancestors who suffered into gods. Human suffering, human seed, dispersed.