She would see him sometimes around Yaletown, her former counsellor, heading glassy-eyed toward a bar or creeping up the back steps of the massage parlour.

Reflections on John Updike's death.

Picture Harper lounging among pastel cushions, his stiff grey hair tight as a helmet on his head.

Again we found ourselves at the shoreline,among shards of shell and plastic,scrim of seaweed trapping my feet like a net.

"...vocabularies / reduced to virus, vaccine, variants— / that dull emergency of the daily count."

With a closing line from Ted Hughes.

There was a fire in your former home, it was on the news. You brought me here, once, in my youth when nothing impressed me.

"Now you are looking up from the bottom of the lake. You are walking past the townhouses in April under the budding trees, and drowning."

The Central American vacation was all-inclusive, but she brought her own guilt, just in case.

Four poems by Vancouver Poet Laureate Evelyn Lau on aging, aching and orthotics.

Four poems by Vancouver Poet Laureate Evelyn Lau on love, life and death.