Runaway Dreams Read Online Free

get that now just as I’ve learned
    that reaching out takes a lot more guts
    than pushing away
    and tall tales are better saved for firesides
    when hurt’s involved
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    there are scars from knives and bats and fists
    that create a map of everywhere I fell
    without knowing that I did
    and there are scars from falling on broken bottles
    careless work with tools and simple
    drunken buffoonery that I eased with lies
    because the truth was so embarrassing
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    my skin is broken territory
    and my heart went along for the ride
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    but I’ve learned to see my scars as something
    far more telling than the fables and tall tales
    I created just to manage having been an idiot
    more than a handful of times over time
    because stitches and the billboards of bare spots
    only mark the places I deserted myself
    in my search for rest
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    outlaws in their hideouts dream
    of a gentle touch and curtains
    far more often
    than they give away

Grammar Lesson
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    There’s a silence words
    leave in their wake
    once they’re spoken
    that’s the true punctuation
    of our lives
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    like
    when I said “I love you”
    the full colon stop
    made my heart ache
    until you continued
    the phrase and said
    dash
    â€œI love you too”
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    period

Voyageurs
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    for Anne Doucette and Michael Findlay
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    Dvorak wrote the “Serenade for Strings”
    in just twelve days and trudging through
    the snow drifts along the bluffs above
    the North Saskatchewan River with Saskatoon
    huffing its breath across the frozen fling
    of it in the valley, the violas sashay
    in waltz time through the headphones
    and I tuck my chin closer to my chest
    and walk in counterpoint to the edge
    and gaze in rapt wonder at the skill of
    this Czech composer and the hand of Creator
    at work together in the same morning
    twinkling with frost
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    the river current buckled ice and sent
    shards of it upward hard into a January
    sky pale blue as a sled dog’s eye
    and the ice crystals in the air wink
    in the sun like spirits dancing
    so that Dvorak’s masterpiece becomes
    a divertimento to the history that clings
    to the banks of this river and there’s
    something in the caesura that harkens
    to a voyageur’s song perhaps when
    this river bore stout-hearted strangers
    into places where only the Cree
    and the buffalo could last the bitter
    snap of the Long Snow Moons
    and starvation was the only verb
    in a language built on nouns
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    crows hop across the drifts
    like eighth notes and the larghetto
    when it eases in as wistful as a
    prayer for home becomes the idea
    that we’re all voyageurs really
    paddling relentlessly for points beyond
    what we’ve come to know of ourselves
    and time and the places we occupy
    so that history whether it comes
    in a serenade, a fugue, a chanson
    or a chant sung with drums
    made of deer hide becomes
    the same song eventually and rivers
    like this contain it
    hold it, shape it to us
    so it rides loose and easy
    on our shoulders
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    Dvorak wrote the “Serenade” in 1875
    and turning to the city now
    marching to the beat of the teeth
    of the wind that churns upward
    suddenly out of the valley
    Saskatoon becomes the everywhere
    of my experience and I ride the current of it
    to the resolution of the theme

Paul Lake Morning
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    from the deck you watch over coffee as everywhere
    shadow surrenders to light
    there’s a motion to it, a falling back
    as though the world were being pushed
    into daylight shapes again
    the boundaries of things assuming
    their more familiar proportions
    so that from here you get the sense of the universe
    shrugging its shoulders into wakefulness
    all things together
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    you come here to be part of it
    this ceremony of morning, this first light
    they call Beedahbun in the Old Talk
    you can feel it enter you
    the light pouring into the cracks
    and crevices of your being
    even with your eyes