A selection of stories, essays and poetry.

Fiction

From “Confluence of Spoors”

The hunter followed the blood down from the North Shore Mountains into Vancouver.  This was the third day he’d tracked the buck his father wounded but couldn’t kill, because a fall broke the old man’s femur.  The hunter had never known a buck to bleed this much and go on.  It should have bedded down and died two days ago, but here were drops of its blood on the white shoulder line of the Upper Levels Highway and, a mile on, a tuft of tawny hair caught on a chain link fence.  He crossed the Lions Gate Bridge at dusk and followed the blood trail east past Coal Harbour, down Cordova Street into the Lower East Side.

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Creative Non-Fiction

From “Where Do the Books Go?”

When my father died in 1996, I inherited 300 books that have been on the Bodens’ bookshelves since the nineteenth century.  There are faded volumes of poetry by Keats and Coleridge, a little book of prose and poetry by “Silly Suffolk” and written inside it a note from the author to my grandfather, F.C. Boden; there is Bradley’s Appearance and Reality and my grandmother’s 1908 set of red and gold Kiplings with good-luck swastikas on the spines; and most cherished of all are the books of poetry written by my grandfather and the Best Poems of 1926 in which appears his poem, “The Son of Man” along side verse by H.D., Robert Graves, and Siegfried Sassoon.  I have found yellowed letters to my grandfather in several of his books, fan mail or sometimes correspondence from a fellow British poet, but never the rumored correspondence he had with A.E. Housman.  I continued this tradition of letters kept in books, when I exchanged a letter with Doris Lessing.

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Poetry

From “Uncollected Poems Lying Around the House”

Wind Instruments

How many winds I’ve watched

stir the fir trees

to this movement, limbs pump

up and down, gyrating

great, green fans in

a semaphore I cannot read.

And never shall, the old arborist

whispers.  It is the wind singing

through the throats of trees,

the sibilant call of a lover

to her lost beloved.

Listen, listen.

Her breath presses a bough

to my lips.  Hush world, shush you

Babel-din.  Hush you chorus of self.

In our stillness blooms the secret bower.

Here sings the wind, hear in this

heartwood, hear our harmony.

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