Talisman
Note on the text: An online publication for now, Talisman will inorporate new poems not intended for any particular collection, reformulated older pieces, and other miscellany.
Bathurst Street
No, it wasn’t right.
Stumbling home late at night
to harvest rye and bad syllabi.
The torn chair and video games.
Have you been out drinking?
What have we been thinking?
You were walking dead with double ounces.
Grass and sugar for breakfast.
But we had good laughter
and I met your dates.
Then the brick of words from the hospital bed:
“it would have been a beautiful baby.”
There’s always one perfect afternoon.
We’re walking through the Aga Khan
and you’re still young, dumb, and broke
but smiling with a sweater:
“don’t be gone so long, Tim.
Don’t be gone so long.”
And there’s always one piece of good advice:
“Tell her this,” you made me tell your rival:
“I’m not here to make you uncomfortable.”
So I still play our songs
whistling for a sister.
If the world was ending
I’d come over, right?
Order take out and hear sirens fight.
But now I see it wasn’t right.
Stumbling home late at night.
When the world’s ending
I still know your name
with our balcony garden
for some better day.
—
The Proprietress
Vivant. Vivant.
I kept saying: “Anna must be alive.”
No O for brother oblivion
if it was just ten years ago.
Go, go —
and beat your crazy head against the sky?
It was five days before my birthday
and perhaps everything I touched
would not surely die:
“I think that I’m in love with her.”
In whose mind will she remember this?
Reaching for the royal cheese
and her mother’s pickles.
No passengers yet but stopping
to damn the planes over Dnipro
and hold up my talents
above the shouts.
I only miss the sun when it starts to snow
or the rainbows over Finch
when damning old train routes.
And in the last estimate
she came when I called her
to hold my hand at the back of Pauper’s
the day after mother died.
—
The Flags
The flags were coincidental.
Bawling up Yonge Street —
a brawny purple, a procession of cars —
celebrating a football match or
another Eurasian war.
You talked about Armenia at the table:
new cousins in chalky cities;
a quadrant of parents
and the recalcitrant father.
You told me you invented your last name.
I know you love the messages.
A full season silent and then
a clattery burst of news
and a book I ought to read.
I start to mention anniversaries.
There was trust in the first June.
The teeth of Earth-fear —
“We need to do something about it.”
Yes: grapes on the New Year of Trees.
We’ll save and hold the seeds.
—
Tenacidad
For Federico García Lorca, now in the embrace of heaven
20 Corinthians 10:3
Your wounds burned like suns
before the sudden waking
in a white room
with all the mind’s truncations.
Iodine and the bullring
with a basket of lime all ready
to face the accusers.
¿Lo demás era muerte y sólo muerte?
Stonecrop and snapdragon
cling to the walls of Alhambra
with their thousand-year tenacity
and now your ears open
to the songs of the leopard and the dove.
“I will not wage war as the world does.
I will let hate sink
with the Falangist trumpet.”
With selections from Lorca’s “The Goring and the Death”
—
The Wanderer
(24 March 2011)
For Emma Charlotte Watson (2011)
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And the people of Ireland (2025)
I
With a mind of trouble, she said,
Fate is the true movelessness. Often
The wanderer finds creation’s kindness
And hands like God before the ocean’s
Roads and cold rhymes ahead of exile.
And we must speak this way as air
Slaughters overwhelm better custom
And the dust consumes dead brothers
Of brothers of ours. In the morning often
Before the dawn I write this way.
Fate does move. The tired minds and soul
Seekers overwhelm it, eager for prizes
But not without a halting loss of home
And half-grief dreams over the first
Little faces that become the last to die.
She unfastened this: far from my true
Brothers and always sisterless without
A dollar-giver (appalled then winter-worn
After each flight’s correction) she broke dark
Halls into a cloud’s expanse of treasure.
And then near or far in the numb lounge bars,
Who would give affection? Or even comfort?
Friendless; so just be kind. But knowing
This much of the wayward a cruel heart
Can sow the beloved inward and down.
II
We lack companions. These are the isolates’
Ways dropping not with twisted money or
Without it but before the takers of youth
And mind-halls that ought to be far gone
On a wave’s periphery of resuscitated joy.
And if sadness before them and empty sleep
Fail then I can give good sayings at least
And sketch a thin, lone man to bind the
Kisses and hugs of contracts’ stupidities
That lay upon you like a heavy throne.
He wakens me again. It is my father —
Lordless and dead. There in the dark foam
Blinking on the feathers of some raptor
Or shark while March beats its idiot weather
Of hail and wind beats my wounded heart.
I am dear for a good man and some kind
Of renewal. I cannot tell you what thoughts
Pass my way. It is a survey of commands.
How he fought; how they fought. And then
Swimmers’ spirits take them, and float, and drown.
Returns should not be a darkening or break
And I know you have seem this world.
When a life is fully thought upon there is no
Great queen of reflections or director that
Deserves the Earth’s failure ahead of worship.
III
She will not give up the floor. Many
Winters await and there is still patience
And wisdom: hot hearts, not burning; quick
Words, not fleeing; final executions
For the guilty and their preening lust.
Something must take hold again because
Vows matter and hearts have purpose — walls
And even hidden portals of arrows to hide
The precipice of dread in view of the beauty
Of this world beaten and laid to nothing.
Drink but ignore provocateurs clawing
Their own halls — the women especially. Proud
Of parties and followings as if it is battle
And not just noise on the brisk ground of real
Deaths of packs of men in the middle west.
And imagine one bird did bear off with creation’s
Message. Are we now allowed to destroy it?
This is the realm castle builders built for;
These waves are the same muse of the singers
Thinking dark and wise through a hard life.
These are the ancient stones where the questions
Were asked that we still ask: where
Have the horses gone and their riders?
Who went for treasure and left us empty?
Who moved her high seat in place of bread?
IV
We have not advanced so greatly. Still some beg
With questions on time — time is nothing beside
The darkening helmets and congealing pools
Of emptied skulls thrown up through media
Of credulity and vanishing mania of starlets.
Be mindful of the actual corpses. Children
See them. We have had ferocious nights
And shadows and you can build a wonder lamp
For the safe wall dreams and spears of easy
Fate and snakes of beloved bright cups and mail.
Ride and do not boast and God will make good
Even the storms and tumult of the northern
Dark and stone. Be wealthy but not greedy
And hail fall will not harm you outside
A brief litter of doubt at heaven’s abundance.
Your friends may crash upon you. And here
Are the good phrases: be a friend in brief;
Be a man in brief; have a family of your own.
The world’s walls are high enough that even
The desolate will not speak to your happiness.
I do not stand apart. There is a courage
In words. I do not care who is well-born.
I know you speak truly when you are able;
I know you can find a remedy of mercy
In the fortress of God.
—
Foreword to Der Meer Reisender
Der Meer Reisender began its life as the third entry in my ongoing Anglo-Celtic cycle, the name taken from the Old English “The Seafarer” (c. 975). The first composition was a transliteration of “The Wanderer” from the tenth century. Although never published in a specific collection, it is a complete piece of work from 2011 and has appeared on the internet in more than one form. The second is “A Modern Beowulf” (2026), the longest single piece of creative writing of my life.
This collection is dedicated to Günter Grass, Anne Frank, and Elie Wiesel. Anne is now an almost daily spiritual companion and one other initial purpose for DMR was to practice German while walking with her spirit. Grass’s essays and poetry became an entry point for doing so earlier this year. Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999, his insistence on forming his own judgement of the twentieth century has informed my own essay writing. Germany is the most consistent focus of Grass’s pen and his obdurateness and integrity in the face of criticism have an element of accusation that great writers ought to provide their own people.
“One day, as we returned from work, we saw three gallows, three black ravens, erected on the Appellplatz. Roll call. The SS surrounding us, machine guns aimed at us: the usual ritual. Three prisoners in chains — and, among them, the pipel, the sad-eyed angel.” Elie Wiesel, Night, pg. 64.
I read Eie Wiesel’s Night on my baptismal trip to Israel in 2024. While later watching his Nobel acceptance speech from 1986, I knew he was the right choice to round out the trio of dedicatees. DMR includes a short interpretation of two scenes from Night that have powerfully informed my own understanding of the Shoa and what I have elsewhere called the great silence of God. Finally, I must acknowledge Ezra Pound’s update to “The Seafarer” in 2011, the best modern English version of the ancient poem that I have found.
Given that my German was very preliminary at the outset of this project, the original poems are short and there are prose pieces interspersed. At times, I will write one in either English or German, wait a few days or weeks, and then “back translate” my own work into the other language. This reinforces my own language learning and, I hope, adds a suppleness to what is my third language. This was the process for the six stanzes of DMR itself, the central poem of the collection.
Also included are short odes and “Birthday Stories” [Geburtstags Geschichten] for Anne, now a long-time muse of mine. An extended essay, “Afrer Auschwitz,” completes the publication; the reader will find a separate dedication and introduction for it below. Much of this writing was done on Wednesdays to break up my week with a favourite activity. Thus, I will sign off with “Gott segne dich” and “Das ist Mittwoch.”
