Quiet Morning at Ocean Pond
Morning: the rise and fall of tiny chests, the tide in them. The old sun going on and on. CLICK ON THE RECORDING TO LISTEN
Ready?
Small girl in a clutch of trees scraped knees peeking from a gallumph of rubbers. Her yellow boots big as the world CLICK ON THE RECORDING TO LISTEN
Trade route
You are knees and curls, a palette of surprise. Rehearsing a way home, your feet too small to carry you. CLICK ON THE RECORDING TO LISTEN
Squeaky snow
Feet slicing over the snow, the sky a riot of blue. Lull the babies to the huf-huf of legs pumping, and the dog racing ever onward. CLICK ON THE RECORDING TO LISTEN
Amazing Grace
Your fine bones and the weight of you. The night unending and the swell of this tiny song, humming. CLICK ON THE RECORDING TO LISTEN
Dishwasher
Late, and the babies upstairs sleeping. Quiet but for this watery heart throbbing. CLICK ON THE RECORDING TO LISTEN
Patio Door
Put your shoulder to the ponderous weight of things behind glass. CLICK ON THE RECORDING TO LISTEN
Clothesline
The sunny ripple of bedsheets and small clothes. CLICK ON THE RECORDING TO LISTEN
Twinkle, twinkle
The woods and your red cheeks and the baby tucked, just so. You find the words and sidle up alongside, swelling with rhyme. CLICK ON THE RECORDING
Bell at Stag Harbour
Time stopped and the clear blue sky. We wait for a ship like all the women before us, chilled to the bone by the song of iron. CLICK ON THE RECORDING TO LISTEN
Spruce Fire in a Wood Stove
We are reading poetry, you and I, and I am learning by rote the topography of your neck. My fingers memorizing your hidden rivulets and beautiful bones. Time stops but for the falling of snow, the muttering of the fire, the urgency of birds. Text on the button
Pop Goes the Weasel
Round and round go the songs in my heart. Mechanical surprise. CLICK ON RECORDING TO LISTEN
Heavy Rain off the Eaves
One man’s voice, a cat at home curled up on the paper and a phone bill overdue. Him, his voice, suddenly there, like a reflection in glass, a hand on your shoulder, and the wind is inside me, in the cage of my chest, swelling. One man’s voice. No greater than another’s. And perfect…
Frothing Milk
Sun on skin, we lizard in this clearing, two cups of coffee and an orange between us. It’s something I read once, that love is sharing an orange, and so we do, popping the sections into our mouths, into the dark places between words. CLICK ON THE RECORDING TO LISTEN
Noon bells at St. Patrick’s
Real bells sounding. A man, his protege, and the spittle of Wednesday traffic. CLICK ON THE RECORDING TO LISTEN
Marine Weather Forecast
Every pond a scraping with its hem of cobblestone. An abandoned caribou skin translucent with weather rolls tufts of hair into the wind as heat rises from this bloodless land. CLICK ON THE RECORDING TO LISTEN
Fire on the Beach (Middle Cove)
Blue, veined with green, this is the colour of loss. A battered silver tea set the gift of hundreds, the new west sunk off the east. I pocket a piece of bone gnawed smooth by the hungry ocean. We are all dogs nosing amongst the rubble. CLICK ON THE RECORDING TO LISTEN
16-week heartbeat
Tap tap tap tap. What’s your message little one? Tap tap tap tap. Are you a daughter or a son? CLICK ON THE RECORDING TO LISTEN
4-week baby nursing
It all comes down to this he said, Curious. That it all should come down. That it, in its sprawling it-ness, could, or would ever be, felled. The whole shebang. The whole enchilada. Kaput. Perhaps he meant this: the wide world shrunk to one room where everything that matters is this man, sleeping, his…
Two rubber ducks
A drama unfolds in this metropolis of bubbles — two lost on the high seas, their magic carpet no match for the vortex raging past the plug and down the pipes and under the asphalt, out into the harbour and through the narrows toward Ireland and beyond. Saved by a girl with a watchful…