For KB on the Occasion of His 65th Birthday

The theme tonight is “Regeneration.”
Not –”Who invented love?” but
“Why do the effects of invisible tethers
felt as light spilling and piling up east to west
every morning of your life, offer a new day
to learn to love
everything?” To be
the miracle
of light spilling out around you like an aura
looking blindly with eyes of colour to feel
the heart’s way to the soul. Regenerating
as if fueled up by love and miracle
you could possibly last another day like this.
Until the one eye of God blinks
in a snowstorm, among birch, or willingly,
again and again on a transatlantic flight
that has you coursing through meridians of time.

Let us be

careful, lest the soul’s tethers catch
on the delicate wrist pulsing with love
and hold us down when we would rather soar.

I thought I’d tell you
about editing the Reforestation Standard of Alberta
as a metaphor for how each of us
complicit in the logging of the province’s forests
can be replanted
as a new forest
and the process amended annually
so as to get the mixed species numbers right,
but the stars got in through the back door
where “my” Lombardi Poplar clung
snug to that wren’s nest
and it was early morning, again,
in Edmonton, where our parents met
though not each other (their spouses)
–mine skating at Garneau–
music allemanding across avenues.

And now this: felting, the soft darkness winging
into this century as their ghosts
dance among the dreams we dream.