What's the news?

What's the news? I don't know
I haven't been listening to the radio,
but the daffodils are blaring. Meanwhile
morning and evening the peepers are
chanting.  Deer clatter along the breakwater and
into the garden--not a tulip to be found. We've caged the
anemone pulsatilla: still the bees gather.
Hummingbirds buzz our heads; swallows
nest again above the door.
I saw whitecaps in Dufferin Harbour today
on my way to get my hair cut, but here
it's almost still. Fog overtakes the islands,
draws up its noose.

Anemone pulsatilla

Flexible dates

Mind reading and mentalism. Camera gear! 
Free psychic reader, 30 years. (I'm glad you're 
gone, I wish I had gone with you) Raw food. Garden
party. Thursday afternoon in the pet
store. You in your motorcycle jacket
looking at the fish. (Rebecca and I 
miss you) Me, talking to the bored bird. I thought we
had a moment (I miss everything about you) in
the hyperbaric chamber. Belly dancing. (When 
the time is right) You must speak
Swiss German. Have own platinum
dolls. Flexible dates. August 14,
2-5 pm. (You know who you are, 
you were bowling)

Notes
This poem was composed entirely from words lifted from the back pages of a June 2009 issue of The Coast, a free weekly newspaper distributed in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Personals, event advertisements, job listings, adult services and classifieds spell out the traffic of so many secret lives.

Photos are of various sites in Halifax and on the Eastern Shore.

Look Forward, Look Back

(A Short Pronouncement that Turns to Dialogue. And Citation.)

Look forward, look back: isn't that what we we do on this day?  But why just this day, or yesterday, or during the intervening week between Christmas and New Year's, when news is on short rations and so simply recycles? Always so many questions we might ask, but don't:

Who knocks as the clock clangs, as the snow piles up, flake by flake?
Will I be the one who must answer?

Our beauty so fleeting it runs out like ice on a hot day.

How far do I have to run to avoid coming back?

--As if you could, you know.

"Death is all things we see awake; all we see asleep is sleep."

--I know that, that's Heraclitus.  Just so you don't have the last word, here is another of his aphorisms:
"If all things turned to smoke, the nostrils would sort them out."

Or this: "The fairest order in the world is a heap of random sweepings."

--I knew you'd do that, get the last word.

But it wasn't me; it was Heraclitus. 

And now it's you.

No, it's you.  

Notes:
Heraclitis, Fragments LXXXIX, CXII and CXXV from Charles H. Kahn.  The Art and Thought of Heraclitus: An Edition of the Fragments with Translation and Commentary. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1979. 

Photo: Old Montreal through the side mirror