"Wyatt stepped into the night and lit a cigarette"


She said, I don't believe in god
Don't know what comes after
The chemical electric signals stop
She said, Grandpa died
On a Tuesday morning
It was raining heavy


She said
Look at that world, carrying on
The wind carrying on absolutely empty
Look at those stars burn like barns
Making slow turns around the universe
Until the whole thing disappears forever


She said time is misleading as railways
I guess all humans die angry
But I know me, my type
She said
I'll remember someone like you
The rest of my damn life.



Wendell Dryden

Thanks, Jane.

Don't Write Me No More Letters


Letters don't explain anything.
Letters communicate less than two people
screaming in the street. Letters are
placid, wordy attempts at
insulation, at pure exterior design.
Letters are cartographic tricks,
conventions of navigation that
fix the distance between people
and selves. Letters are
conversations without risk, are
formally contextualless, can be
written to the dead. Letters
hover in the blank ether like someone
not quite free of the anesthetic.
Letters are like morphine, handcuffs.
Letters are the medium of power.
Letters are abandonment in drag.
Letters don't say a god-damned thing.


Wendell Dryden

Disaster


And when the ice melts
the cold heart of you
softening, dissolving
something lost
to the dry spring wind

what becomes of you
what mudded trace
remains?

Once,
in the sun,
you shone brighter
than the stars.


Wendell Dryden

Jamming Down At Katherine's

Last night they was burning crows down
on the track-side when some strawman
come knocking, empty
rustling voice rasping
above the propane roar.
Was a hot summer night like
you'd read about or something.
The yellow tungsten kitchen sweating
beer rings into the table and we was
all voices and cards and twin guitars.
Us two piecing together a twelve-bar riff
lanky and wooden as a Georgian fieldhand
broken by sunlight and New York interests.
And some careful eyed blond whose history
I didn't know and future I misjudged.
See them dinosaurs out on Courtney,
all scales and tails, the very fires of
heaven in their breath.
(Jena,
wrapped up in a couch blanket,
perched on the edge of farie,
tumbling sleepy-head toward her mom)


Wendell Dryden

Anyway


Well, he don't look back a lot.
make lists of people he's hurt
or left behind somewhere.
There's a sickness in that
a soft danger like a coyote fever
like an ugly scar she can't hide.

Been a cold, brittle morning
the kind of morning you remember
there's no cure for lung cancer
and heart disease is hereditary
and he's been up since before dawn
bitter as coffee, vile as smoke.

I hear you been sick again.
You gonna die in that fucking bed?
These days I don't do nothing that would
please you, Princess.

but his finger-ends are sore against the
wound strings and he wants to sink them inside
her just to get the
spring back into the short bars
stealing warmth and all those things she used to say
in the dark.

that was ten years ago, maybe more.
sun blowing in hard off shiny buses
the spare-change crowd huddled around Tim's
twisted and cold wet as
night flags and knife work
and it don't matter now.


Wendell Dryden

Reading Paulette Jiles


Words come in the still just before daybreak
moving around nervously
on a draught of dark air
beneath that single bare bulb
the woodstove flicker
the smell of snow melting into wash water,
of hunting knives and split maple
a nylon and canvas sleeping bag wrapped
round a huddled form
breathing in
breathing out
stealing language.

that winter up behind the mountains
chopping into a frozen cove
ice-chips like stars
rainbowing your hair
the pale touch of flesh on such
a singular day.

or crouching on the snowshoes,
the empty twilight chill
ravens in the distance,
bent over a wire notebook,
stub pencil, scrub spruce,
waterbirch,
shocked by the cold need
to keep moving,
half way to Caribou lake.


Wendell Dryden

the north wall

The North Wall

Writing poetry
is not at all
like climbing mountains

a blind move
a pendale from
verglas arête to dièdre

a traverse
unprotected
in the blueness of twilight.

No one ever fell
lost a hold
perlon line snaking free of

slipped piton
broken karabiner
typing out a poem.

Wendell Dryden

left handed poems


last night sunshine
dreamt someone else's dreams
woke up sick, sweating
in the thick smell of furnace oil.

sat watching pale droplets
pock the windows
solitary traffic
in the field gray dawn.

later, the clouds will break.

later,
the street sounds will be muted by
double panes
and a small fly on the glass
walking against the blue
backdrop of a
northern blue sky
will catch the angle of the sunlight
glow the colour of
electric rust.

Tin ceiling ticks
absently in the
apartment quiet.

two dirty cups, an
ashtray,
a stack of trim paper
on the worn gray table top.

pick up the pencil
work it through again.


Wendell Dryden

Lixte Se Leoma Ofer Landa Fela

Wind pushes leaves like dead literature
across hard november earth
watches the light fail
watches water on the table
evaporate like language. The radio
said they'd been tortured and then
hung by the feet until dead. Tiny
birds pick tersely at the bones of
winter trees. First fine flakes
pass through empty limbs. Imagine
primitive man crouching at the
mouth of his cave
cold and frightened
scratching in frozen dirt.
Only there are no words.
Into darkness without words.

In the ache of morning
the dull pain of coffee and knowing
he watches gravestones emerge
dark against the far hillside
silent and irregular
like bear come out
to kneel
in new snow.


Wendell Dryden

She Moved Into His Life

She Moved Into His Life

She moved into his life the way
sunshine enters old buildings,
shafts of warm energy,
little bits of heaven drizzling
down through dusty air,
and like any living thing,
he turned toward the light.

She came dressed like a tutor clown,
hung over from a Streetheart concert,
pregnant with questions that left him
speechless and daft
as a high church monk.

She wanted to know what he believed,
and so did he,
and calling it quits was hard so they
took awhile to get it right.


Wendell Dryden

Solitary


when 4am air turns
woodsmoke blue

like spiders in slow death
we hang
awkwardly
in fine web
winter's cold
basement gray rock

to lay in utter darkness
in fear
of being weak
and loving too fully
the smell of
warmth

breathing in
the white thick steam
until she was
drowning

the rising sun
flattening against the wall
growing daylight out of nothing
woke her up

we walk
and tell the floor
we are bored
lonely
and eat breakfast.


Wendell Dryden

(for Kat)


what shadows your silences have been
cast across the alleyway
the ash ghosts of horses
stray railyard dogs
between us
they stare long like emptied bottles,
windows
mirrors.
Everything closed and quiet in
afterhour barbershops
photos above the ice chest
a man with a trumpet resting
on a stool between sets.
Sometimes
stray thoughts, homeless
and scatter-scared run out from me
but they don't go nowhere.
Gathering like twilight
near the hoops down Norway Courts.


Wendell Dryden

Old Man Sitting Outside The Masjid-i-Shah


The wall is as bright as a child's eyes.
It is mountain tall and warm and heavy with laughter.
It is a puzzle of crayon shapes and colours.
It is a maze of scribbled squares and half-squares,
like the festival of camel tracks at the market or
the new grass crowding the banks of the river.

A broad archway chorals above the steps,
shelters a calm, shadowed doorway
as empty as a mine shaft,
a blackcloth hung between eternity and now.

The streets are gingerbread decorated with
birds and leaves and sand.
The day is clear and solid.
The daytime building is clear and still and unmoved as summer.


The man is small and quiet.
Toothless.
He looks away.


Wendell Dryden

Christmas Harbour


We drove past Christmas Harbour folded
in against the granite coast, a clear,
cold day, waves like pirate silver,
darker water disappearing into the sunken blue,
boats and gulls restless as children
behind the sea wall fence.


Wendell Dryden

No Moment With You


A late May morning when the sun swaggers
into town, crowsnested above the fog
a high seas sailor scattering
English gold
across the table of the bay.

Where waves lap the slip I swagger
back and forth, yakking and yelling
wanting to impress you with every
single thing
I think I know. And you

and your quiet bay eyes, your implacable,
irresistible deep water calm that sails
me straight away.
No moment with you is
ordinary.


Wendell Dryden

Drummer


Jazz is as much about style as it is about notes and beat.
Blue, brown. Pavement. Stardust.
Sawdust floor.

Jazz is a way of acting and talking and being.
Turn. Glance. Wait.
Shift.

alcohol and ice.
the wind from the river.
cops.

Maybe that's why the music always sounds best
when it comes from older, well-dressed men
who look and move like they've
been around awhile.

Now they're glad of the company,
companionship. Glad of a steady paycheck,
and a place in out of the cold.


Wendell Dryden

Like This


She had a mind like a step-down department store.
Shelves all cross-stacked and leaning
against one another as though
gravity and time could be overcome through
close-knit camaraderie.
She lived on too little sleep and too much emotion,
and sometimes too little emotion,
and a certain amount of pretend.
There was a fluidity to her thought and motion,
the turn of a head,
how her hands reached for things,
the outrage of her hips,
memories of being younger, being before.
The sense of leftover music someplace nearby.
There was a spacious thoughtfulness about her
that children found comfortable,
and grown men alluring,
and yet vaguely dangerous,
as if she knew what she wanted after all.
She built sisterhood bridges of conversation
and occasionally crossed over them,
even knowing there was no going back.
She had long golden hair that was darkening
down into the burnt ocher of lingering
twilight streets, the warmth of earth
and cherrywood darkened by
sunshowers, and eyes that reminded
you of tides and salt-mists and
storms far out at sea.
But when she smiled, it was the inland
smile of those miniature wild roses
that push their stubborn way up through
the lambkill and black alder along
the edge of muskrat swails.
She could laugh honestly, with a kind of
deft femininity, an openness and a
strength of purpose that said she
understood just how bad it could get,
and how good it could get,
and that she was happy to be a woman,
even in a time and place
like this.


Wendell Dryden

A Free Country


Some people are happy in Moscow
celebrating life
with loud song and cheerful faces.
I've watched voiceless stars
falling through
the skylight
while the radio
shivered and hissed
of American power.
When it snows
softly
it reminds me
of certain piece
of Russian music,
piano and tragic soul.
I am a lousy capitalist.
I can't even sell my poems.


Wendell Dryden

Snowshoe


The day with the brokenness of light
gentle spun into late morning
across frost salted streets.
I looked back for you.
What shapes the sulphur shows
crowding hot and dense into the frozen
empty air above the river!
Our breath so little in this
immensity of sky and cold.
And you persistent as the wire
birch tugging up through each
powdery step in snow like surf
that eddies around and between us
on the col above
Crescent Valley.



Wendell Dryden

"in the dark and wet"


That night drenched with spindrift
the sea a dark grave
known and unknown
brooding hard against our shores
I called out for you or maybe
dreamt it
wet wrung seagull cries
scudding above Water Street
the clatter of horseshoes
urgent and hollow
in the empty streets.


Wendell Dryden

A Picture I Saw In A Book


The boat was small and warm and black
in an ocean of sky.

The air was warm and orange and yellow
and fire.

The sea was cold and almost brown and it
rose and fell

slowly like something big and old and deep
lay breathing

beneath golden waves.


Wendell Dryden

London

The way railroad tracks write the perfect
persistence of memory
a radar stretching
its static concern
a yard full of dead glass
rain on the girders

see the black snow burning
atop concrete shelters
tank tracks across the fountained park
empty eyed buildings
staring
into graphite shadow

last night I dreamt the murder of children

woken by a thought or a trick of sound
a dawn's cold, gibbous moon

you and your kids were the first time
I understood
going to war.


Wendell Dryden

Elliot Row


He said,
"I was here a week before I started watching the
buses coming,
leaving without me."

Outside the trembling, rain-pocked panes,
twelve stories of terminal created wind effects sent
plastic shopping bags above the traffic,
circling, drifting earthward like
sea-water gulls.
Sitting across a life marked table,
she watched him watching nothing,
stubbed out the cigarette,
a waterfall of
chill grey air,
a mood between them.

She said,
"You like to travel?"

she thought,
you like to run.


Wendell Dryden

Beach Walks

Beach Walks

Hesitant yet, pensive as the terns half
hidden in the salt marsh,
all the surface tension of raindrops
lingering on old wood.
And then the rustle of a sea-breeze,
the east wind through dune grass,
the weathered sigh of an ocean sliding
over water-colour sand,
and like the wind and the water,
the dune grass and landscape,
you envelope and enfold me,
until you become my
very breath,
and the salt damp earth beneath me,
the washed-denim skies above me,
the ocean that never changes,
and what I love
most of all.


Wendell Dryden

Us Odd Ducks


I know a woman versed in the free
cipher of cygnets,
the crook'd samizdat
of the brown mill-duck pond.
I know a woman moves
deft as a damsel-fly
gentle as a gossamer storm,
flax fine against her cheek.

T.S. Eliot's argued
the emotion of art impersonal,
and Wallace Stevens stuffed
pennies into his pockets
and called sentimentality
a failure of nerve.

But I know a woman
kinesthetic as cricket-song
and sensual as sunlight,
clever as children
and natural as night,
makes me sentimental
as snowfall,
personal as portraiture,
and that's
all I have to say
about that.


Wendell Dryden

Outlaws


The kid sat
in shadow
and blue imported smoke
legs crossed
face tight
twitching
asleep.
Thunder in the East
and night's damp blanket
he was dreaming
dying horses
screaming froth
eyes rolled back
and shuddering.
Coffee, cigars, slaughter
the light from the kitchen
angled across
his uneven breath.


Wendell Dryden

Rosary Hall

I sleep in a room where nuns
once slept
the worn tiles
pulling down at my knees.

Shoot pool in a place where nuns
once lived
and wept, I suppose
and the dampness gathers.

Outside the ether compresses into
electric violence
wave upon wave
of radio static cloud.

Traffic breaks, shuffles
down watercourse streets
the hiss of bike tires
someone plays a lone cornet.

Hammering out crooked poems
beside a rain-soaked window
this hot and pregnant complex
where nuns lived.


Wendell Dryden

Canadianna


Tuesday morning arrived with all the luminosity of
white gold defused through steamed windows.
The sky washed clean as stripped wood.
And Sunshine, squint-eyed and damaged,
searching for something among discarded
clothes, or under a chair,
finding his watch.
The coffee tasted like iron and didn't do
any good anyway
what with air so chill
the rooms so barren.
But nobody asked him about the pain in
his back, or the distance in his head.

And when the bleak wind rose again
late in the gravel afternoon,
threatening more rain and driving the
temperature further underground,
he retreated deep into his kitchen,
gravely disturbing his neighbours
with the Tragically Hip.


Wendell Dryden

Well This Aint Buying The Old Lady A New Pair Of Panties

what, then?
Rain and more rain.  and we stood in it muckle
and raw as though maritime it were our right.
And the dark air sour with stirred mud and the
gas off rotting duff.  Everything wet and cold and
slick as the fly dope sweating through our
hatbands, filling our eyes and our tongues
already heavy with clouds of blackflies and
exhaustion and black spruce and midgets.
Listen to us. Listen to the empty clank of
planting guns, and us all sexless in those big
plastic kidney pots.  Stumbling up and down
barely scarrowed rows and cross broken clearcuts
for fifty fucking dollars a day and winter stamps
which being maritime were also our right.

Wendell Dryden

Jazz

For the great improvisers, for a Miles Davis or
a Joe Henderson or a Sonny Rollins,
stories are never true or false.
They are possible
or impossible.
An artist, as opposed to a craftsman,
is always restless with the truth.
It's more what you can get away with,
how far you can hang off the
outside of things.
Whether this had anything to do
with Davis beating up the women
in his life is another matter.
Maybe, in the end, art and family life
are too impossible to sustain.


Wendell Dryden

the Glorious Revolution


Paint your sneakers
(and leave behind your american drugs)
we'll close crop our hair
wear the beads and shiny trinkets
they gave the natives for real estate
and tramp right to the
edge of the world,
landless and duped.

Come with me to the desert,
and we'll make our bread
from stones
live like the dust scorpions
like the tent people
who set their watches by the rain.

Let's rally in the urban streets
and march against everyone
the glorious revolution
in sober solidarity with our
Latin American sisters
our brothers in Polish dockyards
chanting "we shall overcome"
and dispersing
when the dogs are set loose.

Let's stand on the bridges
so the tanks can't get past
join arms and sing
subversive spirituals
written beneath plantation suns
or in night villages hiding
from Somoza's national guard.


Paint your sneakers.
Don't turn your face.
I don't want to hear it tonight.

That we have to stay here
will be buried here
and no one will write our music
or make legends of our names.

But my hands will grow old
and tremble
and cancer will take your breast
and our colours will darken
empty themselves
while we bang our heads
put our queer shoulders to the wheel
look stupid and red-eyed late
at night when we cry.

Paint your sneakers, then,
if only
to love me
and to tell me there's courage
and worth
in the waiting.


Wendell Dryden

For Ten Years The Kid Was


not permitted to speak in his own tongue

until that spring, before the ice went out
when he ran once more with the free people.

The strength returning to his mind and body,

it was a hard lesson about the dangers of
going around unarmed like some jesus tourist.


Wendell Dryden

Come Before Winter


Come before Winter.
My woolen blankets once thick
as heather are
worn now.
They have no teeth.
The others have gone ahead to some
place I dare not go.
I am alone.

Come bring me your stories.
I am sorry for cutting off your ear.
My sword is put away.
Bring me your tales of empty caves and
fishermen and drunken carpenters.
I will swear each one true.

I am king of nothing.
Of the silence in these hills.
And there is a great darkness on the sea
that fills me with fear.
It waits for me.
Before Winter, my friend.
Come.


Wendell Dryden

MIRIAM


Was she beautiful?
Mary, I mean.

Was her face so soft
caressed by sunlight?

Could her eyes hold you
forever,
this mother of god?

Was she real?
Did she even understand.

Men have stolen you, Mary.

They have stripped your
silence bare
and made windows
out of you.

Mary the virgin.
Mary the vantage point.
Mary the blessed.

You are a prayer they repeat.
You are a statue that weeps.
You are an ecumenical discussion.

Nothing else remains,
but dark text,
lit candles,
and some scattered references
made by his followers

who hardly knew what to say.


Wendell Dryden

Landscapes


And when the old man comes
down from the mountain
his backpack spent
with sand and gold
speak to him slowly
and use careful words
because he has been a
long time without
and within a wind still blows.


Wendell Dryden

She Laughing


She laughing
and the newness fresh as
the voice of her eyes
became comfortable weather
before I remembered
her name.
And coffee
in sunshine
smelling of textbooks
warmed the fall morning
not nearly
so well.
Later, she talking French
at my brain
half buried in German
theology-words
kept interrupting
confusing the issue
making me look
up at
her face in the light.


Wendell Dryden

Nights

Getting cooler now.
Rain coming on a new wind.
Radio pulling in
static jazz from Montreal.
Signals arcing over
sleeping rooftops
romantic factories
low hills of New Brunswick
forests marked by
wet tar
gravel roads
doubling back to remember
where they've been
like old stories locked
deep in the minds
of scarred back salmon
two hundred miles
off the coast.


Wendell Dryden

The Sunshine Kid Meets The Hula Girl


She doesn't seem to need defending.
This is disconcerting.
He could drown in dishwater for the weight
of armour he carries around.
What she says she needs is fun.
He doesn't know what the hell she's
talking about.

The hard clarity of youth.
That's bad too.
The way she talks right at him,
makes him want to back up ten feet,
maybe slip into another room.

Her presence is angular, questions
appearing from unexpected directions,
so that he becomes lost near her,
conversations collapsing into those
five or six tricks woodsmen know
for getting out before dark,
getting back to that point on
the twelve mile road,
the turning place
where we said we'd meet.
Compass feats designed to avoid
spending nights in strange
regions,
where warmth and shelter
are unassured.


Wendell Dryden

Valentines

February is a foolish month
for romance.
Who can learn
another soul
in twenty-eight short days?

Meet me in April,
after the ice goes out,
and I'll play you a sonnet
on rainstorm trombone.

Come out on the train bridge
we'll go dance the switchyards,
play pool with the drop-outs,
throw stones at the sky.

Be careful how you answer.
Something's broken in me,
gotten loose
and incautious.
It happened, I think, in December

I remember
late in the day the air was full
of golden slant sunlight, pigeons
with shadows
the size of ostrich,
cars lined up
for the chance to go home.

I was thinking about you
and your shadows.

I was wondering about you
and your heart.



Wendell Dryden

Saint John


The heavier rain settled in just before dawn, and by noon half the city was leaking; city hall garbage cans pressed into service when the waste baskets and mop pails overflowed. Sidewalks sank beneath ice water freshets or channels of slow moving sludge. The parking lots took on the aspect of Arctic delta in break-up. Trees and buildings stooped, resigned, just going through the motions. Whole city blocks looked like some grand reclamation project - wood and steel, concrete and plastic piled carelessly on up-thrust slag, waiting to be ground down into fill and fertilizer for Hampton or Grand Bay.

Only by night does some of the hopeful glamour
seem to return,
like money come out of hiding.

See the fluorescent signs beckoning broadly,
the luminous windows shimmering like fever,
the high orange fog lights that pool the streets in gold
and bejewel passing automobiles.

Now fire trucks and the red and blue cruisers
sail by like extravagant celebrations,
like movie-set UFOs,
like visiting electric angels
trailing misty wakes.

Even the drenched pedestrians,
lurching in black shadows,
wear the curious damp halos
and the dignified shining faces
of a people who still believe.


Wendell Dryden

Christmas


Someplace else you'll find
the storybook children and puddings and trees
leaded windows and churchpathes and
tophat clerks.
Someplace else kings and pine log fires,
feast days and fealty, a chorus of
angels trudging after each
good page.
Someplace else city sidewalks are wrapped
in chintz and chisel frost,
a fiction of starlit snowfall
sparkling and tasteful as
Bing Crosby
skating past
on champagne ice.

here, small electric lights
run behind the radio
microwave hot chocolate
skeleton snow on the torn lawn
the boy at the door,
asking for an orange.


here is where we live
small and grim
and if I could
I would give you these defiant lights
each christmas
for all of our years.





Wendell Dryden

Every Tuesday Night


Every Tuesday night
me and Robbie
skates stuck on the hook
of our sticks
stopped on the trestle
to look for Orion.

Then on across the snowfield
the woodstove rink shack
the noise of leather and
sweatstains and cigarettes.

Slip skating down
the iced ramp
on to white milk surface,
blades chiseling notes of
pure serenity,
arabesque lettering
trailing in our wakes.

Some nights clear and sharp
as the crack of frost
filled lumber, some nights
slow with tidal snow
scrapers out every fifteen minutes
in hectic choreography.

We were not a great team.

Matched against visitors
we had the appearance of spectators.

But left to ourselves
we were fluent and true.
Delicate as ballerinas.
Mercurial, exuberant in the
black, canadian cold.

Bare bulbs strung like greater stars
in the firmament.

The single P.A. scratching out
Clap For The Wolfman.

A dozen kids spinning,
yelling, staggering
after their shadows

beneath Orion's watchful eye.


Wendell Dryden

Mother Church


Mother Church
stay off my back.
I got no money for you.
You don't get my life.
It's this burning, sour present,
this very cup of trembling,
gives my heart hope.
Not lunatic incantations
in dimly lit gregorian naves.

Mother Church
leave the poor alone.
Stop trying to forgive them.
I won't despise women
or leftists or gays.
The ones you wouldn't shelter, they
told me about their daughters,
the nights in São Paulo and St. Johns
their sons never come home.

Mother Church
you've made me political.
If it's you against the world
then I'm for the world.
Blessing come from human beings.
And all people
and every person
is worth everything
in heaven and on earth.

Mother Church
I'm not your friend.
Despairing gestures nourish kids on my street
like two percent of nothing
like a UN police action
like betrayal in the air.
You gave me dangerous memories,
and I think you should be thankful that
I don't believe in bombs.


Wendell Dryden

Kitchen Dreams


Sunlight morning blue catches her young.
A hard energy, fingers against the spine.
She dreams odd dreams of burnished
haze smokestacks, the highways behind
empty backyards, that lonely
nomadic sun setting
a paved strip afire.

Radio's on, driven, edgy, back
beat tight, and someplace inside
her, the very center
of her, crowded
butterflies take to wing.
There are

figures, friends, strangers,
streetcorner silhouettes all prone
to temerity and can-kicking,
an oily wind cutting through litter and
tobacco sweat.

Kitchen dreams. She yearns for the heat
of an engine idling, high roadways,
early evening photographs. Like a song
in her brain they spring out of nowhere
glue themselves to
her tongue.

Sunlight morning blue catching
her young.


Wendell Dryden

Night Ribbons


Dizzy in the kitchen, tobacco and hard
furniture, feeling ragged as the whiskey boys,
a line of empty beer bottles drawn
like a threat across the floor.
The winter as empty as autumn,
night buildings black as a
funeral dress.
The highway a ribbon
of tail-light red.
I'm home and alone,
remembering your hands
holding me, your
arms like a bed blanket
those ribbons in your hair.


Wendell Dryden

gazelle


You used to be a tiger
at least, one of the bigger cats,
wide, smiling eyes
face, paws heavy on my shoulders
the weight and heat when
we lay together
Now you bound into my days
like a gazelle,
twine your neck about mine,
fix me with those doe eyes
and then race off for some new
adventure before
coming home again.


Wendell Dryden

snowshoe




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#######snowshoes snowsh snowsho
#########snowshoes snowshoes sno
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######################snowsho




Wendell Dryden

The Tall Men


in country
choppers full
like pregnant bellied women

striking the pose
of canvas horseback
on painted plains

brushing aside
all of the questions
real life brings.


Wendell Dryden

"And No Hero Rides"


I'm sorry you won't come with me.
Sorry you won't cross
charred bridges, the fences
around shotgun backyards.
Sorry you won't steal into the stone
steepled church and squat esso garage
or wade laughing through libraries
and crowded drugstores.
I'm sorry you won't
join me canvassing
firemen for oxygen
plunging down darkling fire escapes
into airless city nights
smoking fat cigars
torching in pink flamingo forests.
I'm sorry you won't
follow me along trails faint marked
with the scent of moonlight
and ancient faces dressed
in leather and blues.
I'm sorry you won't
lead me dancing past the
tragic movie houses on
la rue sans joie
to catch far flung buses
leaving airborne
for points unknown.
I'm sorry you won't chase shooting stars
down corroded watermains
emptied riverbeds
the foreign shorelines of
asphalt seas, getting
drunk on late night rains
the tiny explosion of
water on flesh
and growing slowly sober
in the grim yellow dawn.
But our reasons
so rarely matched
and you have blue skies
of your own.

I'm sorry you won't come
but I can't stay here
can't breathe anymore.
I'm leaving the useless formality
the polite feudalism
leaving the exam
before the half-hour is up.
I've packed my dictionaries
wool socks
poetry
grandfather's knife
underwear.
I'm leaving for the deliberate earth
open water
backstreet quiet
air free enough to forget
the floor-wax taste of privilege
and lies.

I'm sorry you won't
come with me.
I've enjoyed your company and
your songs.
I loved you.
I'll remember you
even when you stay
behind.

goodbye.


Wendell Dryden

Dog Days


She's been down by the river
outside the biker bar
soaked in shadow
nursing beer and old hurts,
Andrea honey, this ain't no way to live.


Wendell Dryden