defined state. Ontario cannot go there to dip
its toes. It drives up and across and down and across
and up its concession road grid thinking there’s got
to be some drink or pill or jackpot or old childhood
back lane or full-moon werewolf breakout to get
free of this private property asthma.
BRIDGE
The binoculars on the windowsill were for checking
the mailbox at the end of the lane. If the mailman
had turned it, there was mail.
Dressed for church, we bumped along the lane, all
of us elbow to elbow in the car, and came back far
apart in our thoughts.
I had to hurry over the bridge with my lunch bag
and books or I’d see the school bus pass the end
of the lane.
Through June, at the bridge, green plumes trailed
in the deep amber movement, minnows glinted
where Donna and I swam.
July starved the creek to a trickle-flies’ noise,
stink, suckers gasping in glue. Ankle-deep
in mud, Donna said, “There’s
nothing to do.” Since spring her father had been
paralyzed, cursing in bed. She scooped a fistful
of clay and slowly
pressed crinkly grey ribbons out through her
knuckles-then pulled off her clothes, lay facedown,
twisting her long
bare body like an eel, easing and clenching
her legs until mud squeezed up through the backs
of her thighs. She turned
her smeared face up toward me and said, “Try it,
it’s great.” But I was not there, I was
already here.
WHAT’S GIVEN
Again I reach for the kitchen tap, forgetting the water’s off. Since yesterday, filling the kettle from a jerrycan, heating water on the stove to do dishes, I’ve been reliving childhood routines.
On the farm our drinking water came from a hand pump in the yard near the clothesline. We brought it into the house in a pail that we placed in the cupboard under the kitchen sink. A white enamel dipper floated in the pail. There was running water in the kitchen and bathroom taps but that water came from a cistern in which all the farmhouse eavestrough downspouts converged. Leaves, twigs, bird droppings and shingle grit mixed in the cistern water made it unfit for drinking. And in droughts the cistern was always in danger of running dry. If it rained and the cistern was full we could flush the toilet more than once a day and live with something like modern ease. If it didn’t rain we had to endure the shame of our dirt and smells and our father’s angry rationing.
Most of the neighbours had drilled wells and modern plumbing. But my father had grown up without running water in the house, and he was sceptical about the pressure to modernize. He admired efficient tools but thought that domestic luxuries led to weakness and loss of character.
He couldn’t drill a well and put in a water line by himself, and he hated hiring people. And the job would have been very expensive.
Habitual reminiscence is the skeleton of the mind, Freud said.
Our lives were shaped around water. In a dry summer, the sound of rain plunging through the downspouts into the cistern was like the sound of gushing cash. Sometimes, in a heavy storm, the downspouts would dislodge and I’d have to go out and fit them back in place while water surged from them. Laughing, drenched to the skin, wrestling the heavy live pipes, the thick foaming cascade thudding my arms and chest.
It was embarrassing when friends visited and couldn’t understand our peculiar rules around the use of water and the reason for them. Why the tap water wasn’t for drinking, why the toilet hadn’t been flushed. It was easier to avoid having visitors.
The rules were beyond my control. They were an extension of my father’s character and personal history and of his sense of cultural legacy, of how people should live on the land: modestly, frugally. The house and farm were an expression of his mind into which I had to fit. But the rules relating to water were also shaped, in part, by the weather, by rain and melting snow. My father’s choices made us vulnerable and responsive to these conditions in crucial, fundamental ways. His rules and the rules of nature merged. Or he used the powers of nature to leverage his own power. That’s how it seemed to me at the time. I felt increasingly helpless and isolated in our home with its archaic and unnecessary inconveniences, and from early adolescence I made careful plans to get away.
I’ve spent my life trying to sort out gratitude from blame.
There are many things I regret about those early years, but the way my life was shaped by the immediate natural world is not one of them.
WINTER LIGHT
Across the pale fields near the horizon a few hulks from the nineteenth century lie rotting.
Snow cover, cloud cover: one muffling cloth.
For hundreds of years people read and wrote in this light close to a window. Space between heartbeats. Where table and page hold still.
Depth reaching back to before ideas.
February is all the time in the world. A sea to be crossed in a well-stocked ship.
Books. Photo albums.
The caught look of distrust in my young mother’s photo together with The Enchanted Wanderer will see me through the day.
CONNECTIONS
In grade eight I was in love with the class beauties,
Phyllis Martin, Carol Fraser, Marilyn Roots. I slow-
danced with them under dim purple lights to the songs
of The Platters, holding their hot hands and cashmere
curves, breathing their shampoo in a nearly unwakeable
swoon. I was proud and lucky and took it for granted.
I barely noticed Hope Johnson and Beverly Croft, the pair
always strolling the schoolyard perimeter, watching things—
big Beverly, owlish glasses and ironic grin, and skinny
Hope, yakky flushed cheeks and pointy nose. They probably
loved books. So, when they strode up smiling stiffly and Hope
announced, “If you show us your wiener, we’ll show you our
buns,” I just kept walking toward the baseball diamond as though
they weren’t there. Why do I think of this now? I don’t believe
it’s the missed erotic experience. I was a follower of James
Dean, and enough of my wishes came true. But I’m sorry
I couldn’t match Hope and Beverly’s brave stupidity. Already
naked, they called out my private cartoonish imaginings. But I
was zipped up in my 501s. What if I’d gone with them? Where?
The ravine? Would success and beauty have shunned me the rest
of my days? Or did they offer a chance to be actually human?
REZONED
I stop. My arms loaded with wood in the hot dark corner
where the dog’s dish is and the coats hang under the grey
plywood shelves my father made. Dark rubble of boots
and skates. My mother stirring a pan in the low-ceilinged
heat, the stove flickering red through its grate. I am seeing
all this from a distance. As passing. As soon gone. Myself
as well from a distance, spilling the barnboard chunks into
the battered bin, haunted by the pamphlet my father brought
back from the town hall meeting the night before, its cover
weirdly an aerial photo of our farm. A kind of newspaper
photo. Impersonal. Offhand. Our grey house with its dead
elms and collapsing barns crouched small and alone below
in the tilt
ed grey fields. And superimposed on this dismissal
of us was an artist’s conception of things to come—a red
four-lane highway cutting behind the barn, a green railway line
through the Hords’ pasture to the north, a blueprint of building
lots and residential roads hovering like a net over the acres
where my father had planted small Christmas trees the mice
killed, chewing their bark off under the snow. I had not known
that my home was seen officially as a waste of space. I’m
thirteen, it’s 1961, a place that I thought would last forever
is soon going to end. The woodbin, the warm dark air from
the stove is going to end. I am seeing my home from afar,
dissolving, and my parents moving into some unknowable
future, cut away from the only world I can picture them in.
As changed as I will be. What I’m made of—the stove,
the sleeping dog, the coats and flickering shadows—will be
gone. By an act of the township council. And my parents’
silence shows their acceptance. Expected loss of what they’ve
built. Already they’ve started leaving. This must be how they
felt in the war when my father was drafted. Well, that’s how
it is. No good fighting it. I’d thought the hollowed wooden
treads of the stairs would be there forever, a path that vanished
people had worn, that I’d felt with my bare feet since I’d learned
to walk. I’d known I would leave these things years from now,
and the stairs would stay where they were. But now my bedroom
window, the well in the yard, the view of the southern hills—hills
I’m made of—will vanish. And in that strange new high orbit that
my mother and I share, looking down at the doomed stove, I say,
“We need a light in this corner,” and she says, “Ach, he’ll never
do that, there’s so many things he never finished here.” My
face goes cold. She has never criticized my father to me. Is
our house unfinished? It’s what it is. The water bucket under
the sink is what it is. “He never sticks with anything,” she says,
looking down with me at our small grey roof precariously far
below. Covering rooms where I’ve stopped bringing friends.
Snowed-in rooms swept by silence. I suddenly understand.
Swept by sadness. Myself a chance participant whose memory
reaches only to those stairs, the sash window’s shadow grid,
the corner chimney’s whirring nest of swifts. Fragments
my father has been building with. Following the blueprint
of his needs or Elmira’s history or his sleepless strategies to be
safe. Far from the people wandering Germany’s ruins. Far
from the home he lost in 1933. Six years at war. The arrowheads,
the black scraps of harness, the shards of flowered plates and
bones appeared where he chose to make a stand. Swept
out of sight again. The pan my mother is stirring, the stove I’ve
just fed, cancelled, falling away in the free unknown world.
NIGHTFALL
Across the field, half
merged in forest, two
deer have stopped, heads
raised,
watching,
ears holding me,
their bodies the colour of falling dark,
darker
than the end-of-October field sinking
into night,
one, turning
the way smoke turns in shifting air,
dissolves into
trees,
and a blurred patch opens, a third
deer slips
from the air’s grey
folds
where it was watching me.
the lit kitchen behind me.
dinner heating on the stove.
TWENTY-THREE
As long as I had a mind, I was thinking—I was twenty-three,
married that spring, my wife and I lying on the grass
behind the house where I’d grown up—as long as I had
pictures on my screen, I was thinking, I wouldn’t care what
they were, they could be ragged claws scuttling, it wouldn’t
matter, I wouldn’t care, we lay on our backs on a blanket
in what I knew was the farm’s last summer, earthmoving
machines were snorting diesel clouds just over the hill,
just over the hill rows of houses were going up, as long
as I was a witness, it wouldn’t matter if I was one-eared,
poor, alone, I was twenty-three, my young wife and I
side by side on a blanket all that afternoon, watching
the light travel and slant and the light-soaked clouds build
and dissolve and build from nothing but fine, fine blue,
the moving, the moving-forward world, wearing and
tumbling, I thought, was what I was, I thought I’d always
be a kind of smile, a screen with the feel of a smile with
something filling it, I was wise, I was strong, I wasn’t
afraid of what would come, there were years and years
ahead of us over the hills, sky and more sky, I thought,
as long as I had a mind it wouldn’t matter what it held,
what it played over and over, I was invulnerable, I was
twenty-three, I knew that awareness and victory are
the same thing, the world is all story, it can’t help being
story, and whatever that story would be would be mine.
WINDOW
Maybe my legs had been hurting again. In the dark
sleeping house my father propped me on the back
of the sofa facing the tall window. He said, “Look
at the moon.” Its cold blazing whiteness filled
the sky above the pine’s snow-laden boughs and
dissolved my pain. Dissolved my small body,
my age and name. And beside me my father
filled our witnessing the way it filled the sky.
ELMIRA
at the edge of the fields on the edge of Elmira, my mother
is travelling farther and farther into her past. fields usually
snowy stubble when I pass through. in her last days
she was back before I was born, had never imagined me.
cloud-grey space with distant barns. back before she
was married. beyond the huddled smokestacks and steeples.
her father with his gold-braid cap in the town band. wide,
wide silence. crows. the swelling and dwindling wwhoosh
of a car on Highway 86. had just written her grade thirteen
final exams, Latin, History, five years against what her
father wanted. her teachers shaming him to let her stay.
at eight o’clock and four, the Great West’s whistle still
shrills over the frozen stubble. trees hear it in the hairs
of their roots. in the shaken machinery racket again
she swerves her hands, swerves her hands past the fast
blades carving boot welts from bins of felt blanks. miles
out in the dusk the small thin howl fading away. the town
in its faint luminous veil. down the belt-driven row
her foreman father hunched working a stitcher. wind,
rainclouds, sun. leaves uncrouch in the oaks’ bent arms.
rain and sun. a man drives a mower past the tilting
stones. felt-dust in her throat, itch-swollen eyes. Opa
and Oma Hoelscher came from Grebenau for something
good. everything in a wooden trunk. wind and snow.
the boarder upstairs calling, Dodie, bringen mehr heisses
wasser! two bone buttons left in a dresser drawer smelling
of liniment. she never went on a journey alone before.
PAINTED CAVE
DARK STEPS
I remember these steps going down and
down, darkness sinking away,
the flickering lamp.
I remember this passage to the right, its cold
earth-smelling draft.
In there long ago I sang with my parents, ashamed
of my random erections, mouthing shared words, watching
the grownups’ faces-men and women helpless, eyes
closed-singing.
In there for years I worked on an image
while my first wife and children went away. That one,
I think, that someone has reworked.
What did I mean by the bird-headed man pierced
by spears?
This is all my lost mind.
IN THE MORNING I SIT WITH CÉZANNE
The crags, the beauty spots and scars that
might tell us Woodshed Hill’s age and old
employment are hidden under a white cast
with only small holes for feeding tubes
and air. Maybe Woodshed Hill’s not there.
Maybe its February dreams are actual travel
and it’s down south or back in the Pleistocene
or visiting family in Alpha Centauri. Nearly
invisible in the morning glare, the forked
walnut whip I planted three years ago cracks
the snow slope with its sharp hairline
shadow. The mechanic’s explanations never
snap the question chain, never make the asker
an actor. Walnut buds, wren chicks will soon