The Galleon on the Mantle

The mantle sits in the center of our home,

between the kitchen and television: the spiritual core;

The altar in a bachelor temple; where in December,

stockings would hang if we were a family.

On the mantle is a pile of National Geographics from the 1980’s

filled with pictures thumbed through impatiently on indoor days,

a dieing formerly pink rose whose countenance is downcast,

and a thrift-store treasure: four mast wooden galleon, with bow facing out.

If the ship turns out to be enchanted, most thrift-store galleons are,

when the faery-winds change the ship will leap from it’s mount and begin

its voyage; over the flat-screen television playing season after season of

AMC’s Breaking Bad, round the rhododendron sentry outside the window,

through the Burrard Inlet, up and over mountain after mountain,

and on through oceans of flat in Canada’s belly. The sailors will sing

songs of faery-wives and children in tiny artic cottages

waiting around fireplaces glowing with green pixie-flames.

When the winds change the faery-ship crew will be dispersed

across North America; amongst the disparate places they’re from.

Soon enough the mantle will be bare, the ship will be empty,

and this house will not be our home.

Yardwork

The yard is over grown: plants

I don’t recognize, a wisteria choking

a decrepit fence that a herd of rats use

on their evening commute to graveyard

shifts over a drooping garage.

But our strawberries a bright,

and there is a rose plant, and apples.

Miscellaneous life groans impatient.

Who is to judge wheat from tares?

Our fence drops lifeless

limbs into the alley.

The neighbors must be talking. Still,

I am untrained in pruning, and can think of more

pressing matters than weeding—seven seasons of Star Trek:

The Next Generation on Netflix for instance.

Daydreams of Putin

I hid behind sunglasses,

when tears pushed through

I thought of Vladimir Putin shirtless.

My thoughts were cloaked,

but I’m not so sure she didn’t guess. I wondered

what dreams the Russian president let go,

if he made mixed tapes

for American presidents

but kept them for himself,

if he saw Chechnya as a metaphor

for some recurrent heartbreak.

My thoughts bent around

cheap plastic rims, back

to the problems I’d been avoiding:

there was no outcome I could label success.

She was my Chechnya.