N.D.Williams’ Books

Dog At Your Door

              In her dark house you sisters sleep still unaware

              of this barking hungry dog outside scratching hard

              at the back door through which he smells your mother’s ghost

              burning up your bread  books and  boots in her oven

              You wake first and shake Norma wishing she could keep

              sleeping and dreaming of a song without questions

              and Ruth keeps her eyes shut for she will not tell where

              the key to your mother’s house is that would admit

              me who won’t ignore her and let out you who would

Brian Chan was born in Guyana and now lives in Alberta, Canada. These poems are from his new collection Gift of Screws which will be published by Peepal Tree Press in February 2006.

Poems by Brian Chan

 
 Waiting On The Waitress

Empty hands need fire

to play with, to burn by,

so as to smoke a new

map of the world in her tired

face now shadowing like a cloud

the questions of your open hand

Twilight Over Saskatoon

 Out of the blue-jade

     gouache of a smoky sky,

          the perfect batik-dot of a sun

               stares de haut en bas at us riding this bus

          as though neither it nor we must fade,

      nor the earth turn nor the eye

more gradually dark.

Brian Chan was born in Guyana and now lives in Alberta, Canada. These poems are from his new collection Gift of Screws to be published by Peepal Tree Press in February 2006.

                                       Copyright 2005©by Brian Chan

             To A Fish Out Of Water

 
                 You know your loneliness is final

                 when the best words no longer comfort

                 and breath flows neither bitter nor sweet

                 in your indifference of a desert

                 whose cathedrals that match your cool are

                 looming around you like dried cacti.

                 Your despair rhymes with their stark stare but their

                 plainness finds no echo in your skew eye.

Brian Chan was born in Guyana and now lives in Alberta, Canada. These poems are from his new collection Gift of Screws to be published by Peepal Tree Press in February 2006.

                                       Copyright 2005©by Brian Chan

THREE POEMS by BRIAN CHAN

                Transcendence

                       The useless matters:   the invisible

                      waiting to be seen by eyes made again

                      naked as a newborn’s:   a bridge across

                      an open space that needs to remain                                                                       

                      open:a domain without a border  

Black Coffee In A White Café

                       In this bright day full

                         of  emptiness,  all words fall

                      like screaming birds shot

                     by hungerless men.

                     Through that rain of corpses,

                         I see you at the open door about

                      to cross the rug bridging

                     your dream and mine.   Two dreams

                     are always crossing and some-

                         times their authors know how not to let

                     the chance of a third,  even

                     as it appears,  fade.   But white

                     fences are no less effective

                        for being almost erased by the sun,

                     for the more children play behind

                     them,  the tighter their

                                                            gates stay shut.

To Be

                     still at one point of day,

waiting for a never-before thunder again

      to throb through the vein,  not habit

but masked hunt,  the slack tension of a tiger perched

      in a tree of pacing nodding

monkeys and macaws,  disinterested but total

      in his commitment to these limbs,

beyond any question of fall or other word,

      not even waiting but knowing

that already across the stretched scroll of air is

      drawn the arc of impulse that will

be stamped into fading rainbow when a certain

      flake of iron obeys the pull

of the magnet of focus and springs so in full

     surrender to one more exchange

between the flaming tongues of old blood and new breath    

Brian Chan was born in Guyana and lives now in Alberta, Canada. These poems are from his new collection Gift of Screws to be published by Peepal Tree Press, England, November 2005.                      

Copyright 2005 © by Brian Chan