The Refrigerator
Ice furnace, white mammoth, airtight
purr restraining all the stars of space.
Freonated coils in figure eights
stand in preservation. Five-by-two
by two-point-five it stands.
the milk, push closed the door and wash my cup.
Water deep inside the glacier moves
ceaseless through its pale blue, pitched black rooms.
I pass a cloth across the countertop.
There’s a constellation I compose;
door ajar its mass of starlight hums.
There’s a coded starmap to behold;
I occupy a station in the field.
The hunter lays a beast in snow.
The Grain of Sand
Maze of one, speck of time, winnowed
to my pocket from the wide and cloudless
night, I feel you winking blindly
at the stars in steady sequence.
Long-winded you’ve come to me from eye
to eye, from dunes where centuries ago
you scored hoofbeats of Mongol horses,
galeforced up across the continental strait to here.
The glacier’s melt exposes siftling grit,
digestif to the grouse which eats and shits
the world in dumb perfection.
A man is lost awaiting some instruction.
Somewhere inside the ice a cellphone rings.
The Double Espresso
Star’s collapse, demitasse of black,
the oil-slick moment presses through a sub-
atomic aperture. Adagio
to presto, a strange century disrobes
before I’ve had my toast and jam. I knock
a cup of sugar cubes, it spits across
the tabletop – metric archipelago.
Adrift a month of days the sun
can’t set, I start to think it never
will again – or only once. A hiss
of hydrogen sings empty to the sky.
The table leans. A whiff of steam
escapes, turns in its ravelled seam
and vanishes, sinks a nether city.
The Coconut
A tightship freshet palmdrops seaward, sounds
and bobs, embarks to troll for foreign shores.
Landless, sunset’s slick retreat congeals,
tars the ocean’s gills and stills the ark’s freeway.
I ring the bell again, the empty lobby
damply swallows it. A pair of snails
progress at odds across the countertop,
their inevitable intercourse a thunderclap.
The contents of my suitcase counter violently.
All night I pole my way across the tundra;
the bloody speculum of morning draws the delta.
The ocean’s drift is littered as a market.
The Grocery List
Half completed – half struck out: jots
to tally seventeen in foreign script,
characters with shoulders sloped, lizards
cats and coiled shrubs all penned
to sailcloth. Beached, I found the page
salt-stiff where surf collapses rooms
of sunlight from the water. Crabs
have dragged their markings to the foliage,
and here a batt of fibreglass pulps
the jungle floor. A set of steps
recounts a path entangled with disuse.
I turn the list and shake the pathway loose.
Michael Reynolds lives in Whitehorse, with his wife Jenny and their two children. His poems have won the Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize, and the John Haines Award for Poetry. He was also a finalist for the CBC Literary Awards in 2005, the Bronwen Wallace Memorial Award in 2006 and The Malahat Review Long Poem Contest in 2007. His work was anthologized in The Best of Canadian Poetry in English 2008. Michael’s first book, Slant Room, was published in 2009 by Porcupine’s Quill.
Over the last decade there has been a near-plethora of books written about northern caribou. 
