Park Drive Ravine
There’s rain that
falls just short
of the level when
pride lowers itself
to stay inside,
so--
walk the ravine.
Each surface
seems fine. Just
dotted. Not damp.
Moss has the back
of the bark beneath it, grey
as a shade gone
past our best interests.
It stretches on
rocks like dried shrunken doilies
after a wash, the
feel
of a dry sponge
wiping moist wood.
We perceive the
ravine as purity, quiet,
but
green is the
criminal element
working this
crowd. The Norway Maple,
as if under an
alias,
assumes the
identity of the native Sugar.
A fraudulent form
of an indigenous tree
whose leaves seem
the same
as its
counterfeit copy.
Wild garlic
mustard wires this world
with tendrils
that twist through
each captive
coordinate,
a slow circuit
breaker of natural growth.
Do you know what
you’re seeing,
or just see what
you know?
Japanese Knotweed
sprawls over land
like unlicensed subdivisions.
Park Drive Ravine
There are so many
shades of green on a branch
the sun can’t
expose the one
most fraudulent
as
complicity finds
the perfect cover
in Common
Burdock. Staghorn Sumac.
Wild Sweet
Clover.
Each leaf is a
face on a wanted poster,
unrecognized
as we walk by.
Rosedale Quarry Renovations
The route was
familiar but not so the path
with excavators,
bins,
and orange
plastic fences sunk into
mud that gave no
indication
it would ever be
leaving, let alone
vacate the
premises in the near future
that seemed, so
far,
to be later than
planned.
Ongoing
improvements were posted on signs
smeared with
graffiti like ketchup on a bun.
On weekends,
off-duty machinery
froze in the face
of random
cyclists who pulled down shades
the way robbers
pull up masks
then trampled the
netting like
a taunting that
dared them.
We stood as
ourselves,
ankles in muck
like spoons in
thick batter
while a squirrel
sat high and dry on a branch,
watching us till
it was finally
seen. We saw what
it was
but not what it
wanted. Much like
this landscape,
prone on its haunches,
stopped by a
vista under repair
that looked no
further along.
Summer Dusk,
Port Union Park (The Peaceable Kingdom)
Port Union is
Asia along the beach
where families
walk
the Water Front
Trail, women
whose saris
flutter behind them
as if their own
shadows were swept off their feet,
shadows swirling
through fabric
as if all its
dyes
ran liquid again.
Babies in
strollers, the old, the elderly--
what you see
ahead of you
follows behind.
As if every stranger
knows you
know. Knows you
can:
to walk from one
moment
into the next
without having
to think if it’s
safe to do so--
how often can you
follow that feeling at night?
Where else
but here
can some afford
it?
Just neighbours
out for summer air.
Each step is a
solace
in this shade of
darkness
of no one colour.
Only yours.
The sound of
people sounding safe
to you.
Summer Dusk,
Port Union Park (The Peaceable Kingdom)
How a voice is a
balm
when it does not
berate.
How the lake
won’t lunge
as some stranger
can.
Spray is not
spit.
Surf hurls no
insult.
Can home be some
other place
than before, the
way
some notice a
family resemblance
between this lake
and other shores?
Above, on the
trestle,
the VIA train
heads
to its audible
vanishing point
in Toronto. The
last gulls fly from
their voices
behind them.
The slope to
Highland Creek
rises like a
drawbridge
about to be
raised. Time to turn back.
And look—right
here,
by the grey rocky
shore,
someone has built
a small stone inukshuk
pointing
west
or east.
Night Arrival, Train Station
Like a home to
the outcast, loner, drunk,
there’s the
snow-dampened track and arrival platform,
some mugger’s
backlot just past the door
that pushes
against being pulled open
by you. Dusk is
the lobby to the evening beyond it,
dimming the
lights. Scuffed tiles lead to
the asphalt
before you, flat as a tarmac
that glides past
your feet.
How come the
directions you crave the most
are never posted
on signs closest to you?
Any guide out
would be good in the way that
a chance of an
exit offers release
but confidence is
a concept you don’t yet feel
where danger
impersonates
people so well—strangers in groups,
standing, talking, at ease in their numbers,
while you’re one
person short of
belonging among
them.
Incapable of moving outside your discomfort,
you’re accounted
for:
neither wanted
nor missed.
You once
dismissed errors as plans
made by others.
Now you’re not certain,
less than
convinced.
What are the odds
of you doing better
Night Arrival, Train Station
compared to
making your own life work?
You’re trying to
rest on plastic benches
molded to
contours of so many bodies
that were never
your own,
that never quite
feel
you’ll relax
among them.
No matter how
much you get up and move,
you stand in the
way of
being yourself,
don’t even know
if there is a way
around yourself
under such
conditions.
Self-consciousness
won’t find you a corner
quiet enough to
leave you alone
so you walk to
conceal how much you wander
past racks of
donuts with icing like slush,
rows of candy
bars packing their doses
of sugar into so
many legal grams.
No hunger to have
an appetite here,
where coffee
tastes of its paper cup, cream
on the cusp of
its curdled future.
Whatever you lack
seems always on
offer, hence,
no one takes you
up on yourself.
There’s nowhere
to hide from
this person
inside you intending to stay
Night Arrival, Train Station
for the rest of
your life,
whose complaints
always find
an open door in.
So, carry that
baggage.
Yes, you’ve
arrived.
But not to
depart.
Not yet.
Kevin Irie is the winner of the 2024 Short Grain Contest for poetry in Grain Magazine and second runner up in the 2024 Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest in The New Quarterly. His most recent collection is The Tantramar Re-Vision (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021). He lives in Toronto.