Remembering always to breathe isn't as easy as Thich says, decoding the shadows of madness, your tigers that live in the corners, that aren't visible to everyone. You don't dare to recognize the facts as you breathe them. Let them wrestle your wild bones over meat, let those images be, like stones sidle through your fingers, the bitter grit of life. These moments firefly flash, watch when you can't wait anymore, when you sing, So hard to be crazy when you sing, when you won't wait anymore. These moments firefly flash - watch the sweet grit of life sidle through your fingers. Let those images go like stones, meat over bones. Let your wild wrestle those facts as you breathe them. You dare to recognize they aren't visible to everyone, those tigers that live in the corners. Decoding the shadows of madness is as easy as Thich says - remembering always to breathe.

See, there were five of us in the back seat, Dad's '65 Bel Air 396. Being the smallest I was tossed in last to filter into any space I fit. The memory's muffled but I do recall my left butt cheek upon one brother's lap, my right one hovering the in-between and words I couldn't hear said low and flat. I know I saw a hand reach for the door, I know I sensed another push me out, while rolling in the ditch I felt four things - grass, glass, our mother's laugh, my tiny shout. My parents had one more child than they should - the absolute ice facts of my childhood.

I want you to meet May, she instructs as we pull out of the tall yellow house - the house she'd been born in, same house that had seen her father explode in the back yard, raining down on his own life. The rental car smells like plastic and luggage and the dust that slides in the windows, pine pollen swallows August. I drive so she can study the forest where she grew up, telling stories about singing, and fishing and drowning in the lake - how quiet it was, looking up from the wet sand and shells. Her coral shoes match her floral skirt and pressed blouse, crisp leather purse, the scarf lazing on her shoulders. I could pay my mortgage for the price of her clothes May waits for us at the top of a steep drive between an old tractor and a tire bursting with dahlias. She's tiny and huge all at once and so damn glad to see us. Her eyes flood and she swipes thin snot away with the back of her hand; invites us in to a crippled house simple handmade furniture, curiously clean if you don't look in the corners. May reaches for the ambrosial pie cooling on the window sill made for her childhood friend - her favourite - pauses, curses, pushes the window wide open - grabs a slingshot, a rock, tips her shoulders outside - aims and fires at a sumptuous apple tree, It's been so long, Lo-ee the only sound then, the verdict of a leaden raccoon hitting the dirt.

You must miss your mother she said, expectation swinging in the air - pike choking on the line - so satisfied every source has the right to be missed. But it's complicated. Some emotions are best lived once. Missing her parallels watching Old Yeller a second time. No one needs to see the cobby dog shot twice.

It's hard to measure foreboding in facts yet one thing serves to cool my thirsty ghost - me and my sister drunk, comparing tats. I gave him several thousand in advance thinking to take him seven days at most - it's hard to measure foreboding in facts. He disappeared from mutual contacts my money gone, naught to do but toast - me and my sister drunk, comparing tats. If he'd been first to lie to me, perhaps I'd understand how I'd let instinct coast - It's hard to measure foreboding in facts. We blunder through this world, lit acrobats our hopes for requite compassion topmost - My and my sister drunk, comparing tats. Our kayaks glide beside wizened muskrats we'll spend our afternoon wildlife engrossed - it's hard to measure foreboding in facts. Me and my sister drunk, comparing tats.

The purifiers pair before they fall: slow circles in the air before they fall. Two perfect pearls of water on the leaves; like mercury midair before they fall. Dark red deer jumping guiltless in the road; no sense the truck is there before they fall. The river breaks its bank, pulls hard and flees; old birch trees' wild roots tear before they fall. The kindness in your strong hand forges hope; wind fingers in my hair before I fall. Nature is not cruel, only pitilessly indifferent - Richard Dawkins

If we met it would be by chance and we'd both have Hitler to thank and the war that made our parents cautious when they met my dad was displaced to America while my mother got to stay home- there were no bombs in Canada - had either of them been denied entrance to Queen's university I wouldn't write this poem and before them our grandmothers mine with silken cheeks stopping stirring her savoury chicken, got to make time for robust dumplings to rise her first husband dead, lucky for me her second my grizzled grandpa and before that Krakatoa miles away but the news on the radio could have slowed the rise to bed of your amorous ancestors changing the flow of sperm to egg, making you a different person altogether, if at all what if Darwin had never sailed to Galapagos, would that change the books our forebears read by candlelight encouraging them to raise more, better, children, and would it be forever candlelight without Edison? but of course it wouldn't there were twenty inventors before him, all of them dependent on their great-great-great grandmothers' first kiss - how did twenty have the same idea at the same time where do accident and destiny meet and if our forebears had read different books Darwin and Edison aside would the draft with the swarthy lumberjack on the tap in the mugs between us taste the same?

You remember the ranch and the formidable, flowing foothills dotted by sleepy foals dozing in the spring sunshine while their mothers grazed nearby, that year the bull calves found that if they dropped themselves onto their bull bums they could slide down the long, steep bank, splashing into the creek and that's exactly what they did over and over, spring day after summer day after fall day, until they'd worn all the grass off that part of the hill and were surely sold for meat.

I was at that age, all legs and lean, the foot pegs on my mini bike pushing my knees up level with my baseball breasts. I rode for miles that day, sometimes in the ditches with the grass and wild roses biting my shins, sometimes on the gravel that shot up behind me, bullets of blossoming independence perforating the dust of looming memories. yet all that freedom blew away on the wind the moment my bike died the engine froze, the tires slowed, quiet landed. there was nothing to be seen but fields still too short to cut, yet across the prairie I recognized a herd of cattle meditating in the sun. I pulled my tube top up, my shorts legs down, and started down the silent road, the closest place a dusty ranch belonging to my brother's friend. There were two houses on that land - one had been his grandfather's, the other he lived in with his parents and childlike sister - when she was old enough to vote the government tied her tubes, taking away the one thing she always wanted to accomplish in her life. Sadness lay on her like paint. She wasn't home that day, neither were the parents just him - lithe and funny, thick-haired and muscular, with the easy familiarity of boy-man growing into the generations of ranching that stretched out on either side of him - his fence against mortality. He asked if I'd ever been inside his grandfather's shuttered house, led me in like we were going somewhere cozy for a chat, but it was full of old furniture, lamps and placemats and dust, no place to sit. Still, somehow behind a box of doilies and a stuffed wild boar he found a neat bed, sheets crisp, pillows cased. I sat on the bed as invited, later lay lamblike in his arms as he lowered me through my trust and onto my back, my top sliding under my breasts my breasts under his hands his hands under my shorts, there was no time to consider my response, the weight of his want flattened my fantasy, I didn't feel cherished, or liked, even, just necessary with so much to think about, my eyes sought escape and settled on the glint of the hog's glass globes, his tatty tusks teasing me I had trusted too easily. 40 years and thousands of kilometers later, still nothing discourages me like the smell of warm breath, cinnamon gum and beer.