Live Encounters Poetry & Writing March 2025
Pachelbel’s Fugue, poems by D C Reid.
Pachelbel’s Fugue
You say, I have too much white clothing.
You start to hum.
Several hundred years ago
this could have been mysticism
or heresy. It isn’t now.
Outside there are sirens.
Someone’s been run over.
The century grinds on.
– Margaret Atwood
Dreadlocks of old intentions hang on hat racks.
Pampas grasses confer in wind.
Brown stars retreat to the east.
Wind comes in parts of itself.
A meat cleaver chops Pacific air,
slices Jakarta jet ribbons to ice crystals.
A young girl looks down, wonders if there is life.
Friday night is a belch after a gassy meal.
Guests swipe anything. The most oatmeal
cookies at keeling over means they win.
Crumbs at lips are mouths of bank notes:
plastic queens, Bordens, Mackenzie Kings.
Paper airplanes lift to vapour trails.
A smoke ring moves through its fellows, an orgasm up the sky.
You take to wearing white gowns at Animal House parties.
Togas say, ‘Take me off,’ particularly from wenches.
Concubine men take off white on Friday night,
get down to chest explosion Cheetos and bad television.
The dream is: Conan the Barbarian or ‘I’ll be back’.
Southern California oranges squeeze down
lily-white backs, 24 vertebrae, bump down each one.
Discs slip and TV is a highway to which no one took a grenade.
You pull the pin with big white teeth,
like a baseball player making millions.
Take the bat, silly, do you think this is mysticism?
Not on your baseball. Slide face first into home.
Your face eats a month of dust.
Gathering short-kneed men, the century grinds on.
Open eyes and lose your self to blindness.
Outside there are sirens.
Stare at Zeus trailing whore wings across copper sky.
Night descends, and friends don’t come over.
Many beers magnetize their brains.
Jeopardy opens dollar signs in eyes on Monday, Tuesday, etc….
Mysticism is a gold-edged black book, heads place lips upon.
CNN streams the latest ISIS attack outside your window.
Taxis never stop running red lights.
Is it left or right or out of sight?
You play Pachelbel’s Fugue and it never ends.
You build a kayak holder, but never wash your car.
You read yesterday’s news, almost escape Earthrise,
but dreadlocks of lost intentions hang on hat racks…
The Magician that a Poet is
I would purchase the rains of remember
I would purchase the stars of recall
and what to preserve in a poem
but the drenching of darkness with light.
– John B Lee
When the automobile came at me, the flying
of my body I did not feel but the five ribs
smashed told me I could win no war with
concrete, no matter my way with words to explain
the flight of body connected to me. The MRI
showed the incandescence of pain, inability
to breathe and interstitial muscles I knew not
on 24 ribs. Meteoric electrons were found stuck
to miniature fractures, a Milky Way on bones,
you can’t see when you wear them, and not
being able to breath, in the berserk serenity
of white, Nile lights. And the vehicle took me
there? It decided not to slow, bearing right, to not
cover itself with blood of mere human poet.
I don’t have the coin to purchase remember,
but the stars of recall came to me kissing
the concrete, high buildings of cars shouldering
around my soiling blood. I got to keep some
of it, my hand with its vermillion palm I did not
have to hold out or take with a paintbrush.
By the cemetery by the sea where no one lies
a-sleeping for all the flesh is gone. And angels that
don’t exist, don’t watch over what no longer is nor
can be. And the shore is women falling on
themselves so vividly my eyes are in motion to save
and protect. Ah, the magician that a poet is, pant
leg stuffed in my sock, white helmet protecting
only my head.
Notes: I have been run over by cars twice, not just once.
© D C Reid
D C Reid is a writer and poet whose work lives in multiple disciplines: web-based video-poems for his book You Shall Have No Other on www.sandria.ca; environmental writing, for which he has won multiple awards including the Natonal Roderick Haig-Brown Award; and novels. His poetry has won silver in the Bliss Carman Award twice, among twenty-five other awards including the Colleen Thibaudeau award for significant support of Canadian poetry. He is a former president of the League of Canadian Poets and the Federation of BC Writers. He released a memoir of decades spent on the Nitinat River titled A Man and His River, published with Hancock House Publishers in 2022. It won the gold medal in the Professional Outdoor Media Association of Canada’s book contest. His most recent publication, Selected and New Poems, is his eighteenth book. DC is broadly known for extensive writing on in-ocean fish farms; neuroplasticity and extensive creativity mechanisms. He lives in Victoria, BC. www.dcreid.ca