David Cotter

It isn’t even the pastII watch my little boyplaying happily in the light,my wife beside him,kicking back the footballwith a laugh.Both of them alive,a puzzle I am here to deciphera reward for I don’t know what.I feel my cloud of ghoststwine and settle on my mood,I turn away and thenyou gather across the trench,naked from…

SoilI list my secrets and blood weeps from the words.Red Hand.The North’s hatreds scattered usand we wandered lost and died in foreign lands until I stand aloneback home again.Appalled I pull awayno local I cradledusty ganglionbroken nerve endsphantom limbs of hot or icy tearsI cannot tell, it is the same…Why would I try to write…

Blinking Out / Bouncing Back (for my secrets)How to be Stoicwhen all this loveis pouring out of me?Here writing blindlyI am of the devil’s party.I cautiously perform the plungehaving these long yearsthrough ritualdevised guard-rails, gothic and gnarledbarnacled and reachingfar enough to let me disappearinto this frigid purityand yet return.Oh to be againthat lowest of men!What…

Against Dying (Chun Jie in Oranswell)I step out silent at six aminto the sacred rapture of cataclysmic dawnthe insane revelry of all these birdscelebrates my arrival with seed.Robins gather round me as I turn the earth.On such a morning we might forgetthis is a dying world.My little forest breathes out to meand the stream beside…

BreachAmong other worlds I am broken open,exposed to the cleansing racket of birds,there a fox like a gift on the garden path,a beetle moving slowly beyond measure,weeds through the tarmac, slower still,and I am but a piece of all this dying.Back inside, shabby coat on skeleton,I meet the shining joy of my young family,their gentle…

A robin and a black catI am waiting out in the rain again,pocket stuffed with speckled paper.In the house my warm wife dreamsshe is climbing down a ladder.Let me be counted oneof those who seek oblivionin dosages survivable, and turn awayfrom this stinking world that is bellicose and baying.A robin loiters in the pale light…

I have always loathed myself, and despite my arrogance and my bluster, I have always been humbled and astounded by the way I have been loved by three women at different stages of my life.  When I was young and broken after the death of my mother, a great woman lifted me and loved me. …

I am cleaning out my closet, going through old boxes, seeing what can be salvaged from all these pre digital scraps. These three poems are from Calgary, 1984. They are three of my first poems.  My mother died of cancer when I was in my final year of high school. I began writing poetry in…

I wrote this poem when I was completing my undergraduate degree in Calgary. Chris Wiseman, who expressed great hopes for me, had it published in Arial. I had forgotten about it until I found it a couple of weeks ago.   I include it here because it focusses on a theme that has been a…

Before I learned that the universe is laughing, my brother died in a fire just a few years after the death of my mother, and I determined the world to be a merciless adversary. I resolved to be fierce and fearless to match this foe, and I tried to put that resolve into this poem.…