Lines Composed in a Vancouver Skyscraper

It has taken me three years to come to this view. I know now that the body is a river, water flowing from a stone whose bones and muscles and organs are flowing. I have watched their shapes in the molded Burrard Inlet, contained and onrushing, below bridge after bridge vertebra to the valley, a brown finger of water that still powers the mind, lying long in the trestle arms of this city whose sentence is hard labour. Eye level atop a church across the street, Mary the Virgin stands modest and giant, her back turned to the fuming of ghetto where some evenings the brightest vision is the flash of a streetlamp on a jogger's white Nikes. At night, the red sirens spinning mute across the inlet converge like gentle pulsars at some accident. An hour later, one pulls off, hovers at a distance. All is gesture and sign. Along these streets are the children of coal miners, who have watched the ground carefully swallow their fathers, sometimes even digesting the trapped men, turning their bones back into lime, into coal. It is the oldest fear: that the earth may recall you. Along the top of Grouse Mountain lies a stole of colour unnatural to sky. Twilight's blue collar. But the mountains are a fishing village: steep, hearty, and solid. At night, the lights and stars from this window make the cityscape an Ethiopian bride. As cars bolt around a curve of streetlamps, their shadows flush with their forms like carefully guarded souls. And the inlet churning its wet whispery thighs, the inlet pouring blood dark under the bridges, in the inlet I find my astonished limbs and all the stateless gels within me, desperately carnal, mute, wholly flowing, unburdened toward a distant shore.