Any

           Fresh out of the icebox, this brain looks

the wrong way from time to time, and misses

the cat stepping by, Gerry on the screen

laboring to tell the nuances his pink matter

almost notices, he’s not my brother, not really

my close friend, just my necessary neighbor

on a bicycle going by like a whistle from

the lips of someone I trust. He has a peculiar

skeleton arranged his own way in the mind’s pasture.

We were as they say “of an age” and so inter-

twine somehow, though I wanted to work when

he wanted to play. That long nose is in my life

and in my writing and so is the Okanagan River.

I sometimes get to the river when I am at work,

the sun on my back not the ink in my pen.

There was, when I was last in the Okanagan Valley, a

cat with big paws in the neighborhood, I was told,

fires I could see along the hillside, stunning heat

from the sky, enough to thaw any brain.