Four Poems by Meg Freer

We Can Always Tell a Longer Story

Long-dead aloe and jade plants
remain on a window sill
like intricately carved sculptures,
more interesting than the dullness
of frosted window film upstairs.
The building’s immune system
doesn’t seem to be working well.

I have not seen the occupant
for weeks, have not smelled
the cannabis when I walk by,
although certain lights stay on
around the clock. Skipped town
for a while, perhaps, but no one
knows where to look or who to call.

I collect the tomatoes at least, before
the vines fall over from the weight.
An abundance of milkweed pods
and ‘kiss me over the garden gate’ flowers
dangle with green and magenta exuberance
over the barren driveway. Those plants thrive.
They don’t care if anyone lives there or not.

*

Watcher

Winter evenings, she watches
snow-covered rooftops, the factory’s white exterior,
and even the limestone walls of the historic church
turn lavender briefly at sunset.

Distorted nighttime sleep allows her to see
stranger things from her high apartment windows.
The man who stands on a bus stop bench,
rocks it back and forth while he entwines
willow branches into a large wreath for his head.

She keeps an eye on the tiny house that sold
but that no one moved into, watches for squatters.
Mostly she hopes for better sleep, or at least
that someday she will see something useful
like the man wanted for assaulting a woman
in the nearby park, or find out who does things like
pull up all the garlic in the community garden at night.

*

Tea Party

After the drama and mild trauma
of visiting the hospital’s locked ward
for the first time, entering the bare room
with neither table nor chair, where my friend
must subsist until her world stops turning on her,
I seek refuge with my neighbours,
my heart in need of a bath to wash away
all I saw and heard. We talk in their kitchen
with cups of ‘Irish tea’—whiskey,
in their house—because they say
I’m too pale. The ‘tea’ slows my heart rate,
and I gently close the door on that day
before it bangs shut.

*

Small, Weird Things
         in memoriam Bob M, poet

Breath combs the sides of my body,
clean lines of limbs between panes of glass.
Ginger and fig consort at the tip of my tongue.
I enter a secret room through the hole
in my pants pocket, discover bowls of silver coins.
Mountains lie down in submission at my feet.

Did I dream such things, or did you
send these images from the other side?
We wish you could see our celebration
of your life, then you enter the room
in the body of a squirrel—right on cue,
after a mention of “small, weird things,”
and we all cheer to know you made it.

Next morning at the bakery, a sign reads
Yesterday $3. Yes, I will take yesterday
for $3 if it means you will return again,
one more time. You always managed
to right yourself after falls of many kinds.
But even a squirrel will have one last fall.

*

Meg Freer teaches piano and writes poetry in Ontario. Her photos, short prose and poems have appeared in various North American anthologies and journals, and she has written two chapbooks of poems. She holds a Graduate Certificate in Creative Writing with Distinction from Toronto’s Humber School of Writers.