What Warriors Do
I never thought that I would see myself lugging armloads
of wood through three feet of snow to pound my feet at the
door of a cabin in the mountains to step into the warmth
and crackle of a woodstove set in the corner of a living
room with a window overlooking a lake where the gray of a
February evening eases to a purple hung with stars. Never
thought I’d see that. But then again I never thought I’d see
myself banging nails and sawing wood, hanging pictures or
planting flowers. I’m a warrior for God’s sake. These hands
are meant for fluting stone to points for arrows or for spears.
For hauling gill nets out of water so cold the knuckles won’t
bend and for flaying back the skin of bear or moose or fighting
back incursions, invasions, threats. That’s what warriors do.
Instead, I stand at the sink when dinner’s done washing dishes,
preparing the morning coffee, wiping counters and the table
and making sure the dog gets fed. These rituals and small
ceremonies I’ve come to. I never thought I’d come to see me
looking at myself as something more than I have ever been or
acknowledging that there is even more to the territory of my
being than I have come to see so far. I’m older now and quiet
feels better on the bones than noise and the only fight in me
is the struggle to maintain it all, to keep it close to my chest, to
give me another heart to beat against the cold. Never thought
I’d see that. Never thought I’d welcome it. But these days the
land beckons like highways used to and I’ve learned to step
outside the door and be here, rooted to place, grounded,
anchored by words like love and home that drop from my
tongue like beads of light, shining, showing me the path to
our door even through the darkest night where I’ve learned
to listen to your breathing while you sleep. Touch you. Feel
your skin against my palm and sing an honour song to the
energy that wraps itself around us, surrounds us, protects us.
I’d carry the world to you like those armloads of wood, one
sure step at a time. That’s what warriors do.
Ceremony
ceremony doesn’t change you
the old woman said
you change you
ceremony
is just the trail
you learn to follow
until you reach the place
where that can happen
I became an Indian after that
Runaway Dreams
I ran away the first time when I was fourteen
sleeping in the cab of a rusted old Chev pickup
in an orchard outside of Beamsville
and waking to a morning purple as an old bruise
hungry, cold, lonely as a whipped pup
knowing I had to go back
but wishing strenuously
otherwise
I hit the road again at fifteen
and made it all the way to Miami Beach
the feel of the Greyhound wheels churning
through Pennsylvania like a hymn
and listening to an old black man in the Cincinnati station
sing me Bukka White songs with a tambourine
brought me more of the world in three verses
than I’d ever heard before
wandering Louisville
in the stark grey-green of morning
and realizing that Kentucky was more
than just the words of some old song
that it was people streaming to work
and the smell of fresh bread hanging in the air
somewhere like a tire on a rope
spinning and telling its stories to the breeze
then suddenly Knoxville
and the rippled blue promise of the Appalachians
while the guy beside me stank of old tobacco
and sipping Southern Comfort from a flask
talked of his home in the hills and how
Baltimore never really gave him a chance
to get his feet under him and make more
of things as he’d planned
for Ruth Ann and him
and the three kids
waiting
to myself well into the red clay hills of Georgia
and there was something in the way Atlanta shone
with a hard resilient southern promise
that gave everything a sense of adventure
and hope so there was no room in my chest
for lonely or sorrow or melancholy or pain though
they were my constant partners then and I had
no wish for anything but the road
and the miles stacked up like a wall
between me and the bog of faces and smells
and recollections that had never once
meant anything like home was supposed to
in anything I’d read
from Lake City through Jacksonville
Daytona Beach and Fort Lauderdale
then swinging jauntily through Hialeah
into the shimmering pastel light of Miami
Florida was a dream unfolding like a map
I traced with a quivering finger against
the slick and polished windows
I splurged on sandals and a flowered shirt
and headed over the causeway to the beach
and stood gape-jawed and shaking at the glitter
of sand and surf and cocoa buttered bodies
and the push of cerulean blue
rinsing St. Catharines from my feet
I had paper route money
I’d taken from the bank
and it was enough to see me through a few days
and nights of sleeping on the beach near the breakwater
and the old hippies I met sharing wine and weed
singing Beatles songs, everyone caterwauling
the na-na-na Hey Jude part before downshifting
into “Let It Be,” told me where there was a job
I could have if I could cook
up a good enough story and it turned out
I could and I spent a week and a half swamping
the floors of a cafeteria and bussing dishes until
I couldn’t come up with a social security number
and they let me go with a handful of cash
and a sack of leftovers I carried to the beach
and joined in for a round of the goatskin
and a huff of the weed before seguing into
an emboldened version of “Me and Bobby Magee”
we stamped the streets of Miami Beach like rogues
swiping drinks from sidewalk tables careful
never to break a glass and laughing giddy
as only young fools can, never minding things
like hunger, rootlessness and a unique kind of lonely
that sets in on you when you see families together
ebullient in their joy of stepping forward into
the world joined by the hand and a look in the eye
that says “contentment” that jostles at your ribs
and one night talking
at the bus station counter with a motherly hooker
named Esperanza who fed me and made me
drink milk and eat an apple before turning me in
to the Border Patrol and telling me to go home
because I could die on those streets and kissing me
full on the lips the smell of her
all sweat and salt and jasmine
I carried north into the hard slant of winter wind
at the airport
in Toronto
where it faded in the cut of eyes
waiting to get me home
and out of the public eye
there was no hope for me after that
the world had come up and flashed me
and shown me that there was more to it
than the brutal isolation of that house
and that magic existed in the open spaces
between buildings and people bent on
making something more out of something less
and all the runaway dreams —
they tried of course, to bend me to their rules
to discipline the Indian right out of me
and with every whack of the belt or hand
the bruises they made sure were
hidden well beneath my clothing
they’d look me sternly in the eye and say
“you’ll never run away again” and I
would almost laugh out loud because
of course
I’d already left a thousand times
by then
Carnival Days — 1973
Riding the big rig out of South Cayuga
while headlights peel the skin off
Highway 3 leading you into Byng and Winger
then dipping south again into Wainfleet
with the smell of horses and cow dung
and fresh cut alfalfa. Timothy maybe, clover
and rain cutting north and west off Lake Erie
the sway of the fields so close
it felt like a sea
and the smell of grease and oil and rope
in the cab of the old Mack truck made you feel
like a mariner even though at seventeen
you’d only seen an ocean once
only ever felt adrift without a compass
or a pole star to lead you
so you pull into the town asleep
in the early morning wet
and stand shivering beside the rig
while other carnies drift across the lot
to stand beside the ride boss, smoking
smelling of last night’s beer, cheap weed and two weeks
on the road without a bath and no one
says a thing, just stand there scratching
at their stubble or their ribs while the big man eyes the grounds
then grabs an arm of staves to mark the midway
marches it out in a matter of minutes and returns
to spit a stream of snuff at your shoes
and says “let’s get ’er in the air”
you had no clue of what it meant to be Indian
then but it always struck you as a tribal sort of thing
that clanging, banging, sweating, cursing ceremony
of getting rides in the air
the lot of you bound by the carnie code
that says you work the show together
tossing wrenches, bolts and ball-peens between
the Tilt-a Whirl, the Octopus and Ferris Wheel
seeing whose crew could “get ’er done” first
then walking over to lend a hand elsewhere
so you heave and grunt in the hard sun
of another small town morning and try to ignore
the parade of hurly-burly village girls
trying to pretend they’re not
the dip and swirl and thrust of young hips
eying the brown of you like a midway treat
edging closer and closer and asking questions like
“where ya from?” and “is that like, really heavy?”
and laughing, teasing, all rosy pink and clean
until you nod and smile and wipe the sweat and oil
from your face and start to promise rides
for free until someone’s father grinds a smoke into the dirt
with the heel of a battered work boot and hollers “git”
you learned to live in a neon world back then
the flash and glitter of those lights all spin
and dance and synchronized and the wheel
turning slowly in the night above you
laughter falling like rain or confetti or the recollection
of dreams lying spent and sprawled, discarded
on the road somewhere behind you
people thanking you for transporting them back
to their own dreams of special girls, special boys
and long, wet first kisses while the wheel crested
throwing the whole midway into view
the light of it spectacular suddenly and them
giddy with the weightlessness of youth
the whole candy floss and candy apple world
rising like the ground to meet them
your world was roustabouts, semi-hacks and game-joint touts
and the smell of frying onions
from the grab joints down the way
and the creak and squeal of gears and turnbuckles
and cables taut in the wind that sent the dirt
in whirling dervishes to skittle across the apron
of the ride you swept clean fifty times a day
and the neigh of ponies in their harnesses
against the scream of someone’s kid
frightened by the yawing mouth of a funhouse gargoyle
or a clown all brilliant and sad in the hard slash of sun
and the smell of sawdust in the rain
when the skies opened up and everyone came to huddle
under the awnings and smoke and cuss the luck
that sent the townies, the marks and the rubes packing
and the lingo of the lot was the argot of the road
where a town was a spot and a trip was a haul
and moolah was money except when you got specific
and what you really meant to say was
a fin, a sawbuck, a double or half a yard
the whole rambunctious, unpredictable
half-crazy, dizzily original
abstract landscape of it all set down hard against
sleepy, wink-eyed, dreamy small town Ontario
or Manitoba, Alberta or Quebec or wherever
that could come to feel like permanence almost
until the last ball or ring or dice was thrown
and the lot boss stood in the middle of it all
and yelled, “let’s get this shit on the road!”
you’d tear it down just to build it again
a hundred miles down the road
and seventeen came to feel like a hundred sometimes
so that when you stood on the hub of the wheel
after bolting spokes and pulling cables snug
you felt the road and the miles and the wind
on your face and the feel of you
standing there suspended, thirty feet in the air
slowly growing older
Freddie Huculak
She’s gone now the old Embassy Hotel. She used to sit on
the curve that dipped down into Port Dalhousie where we’d
go to sit and watch girls on the antique carousel and smoke
and drink and talk about cars and women and fights we’d
seen and he’d tell me about life on the boats and how the
St. Lawrence came to smell of everything that ever went to float
on her and how if you listened hard enough you could hear
those tales leaned over the rail in the fog come mornings
aiming for port. He told a good joke, too. He’d laugh like a
bastard and slap me on the back and pull me into it so that I
laughed too even though I didn’t always understand what he
meant. I was just an under-aged kid slinging beer for seamen
for eighty bucks a week and living upstairs in a shitty room
beneath his, and hell, I needed heroes so bad back then that
a rough old tar was a blessing even if he was prone to two-
week sp
eed benders and I had to talk him down sometimes
or get him out from under the bed when the paranoia drove
him into hiding and feed him soup and crackers and roll him
smokes and watch him while he shook when the turkey hit all
hard and fast. Still, he watched out for me. He’d bowleg into
the tavern, slap me on the back, and make a show for the big
boys that I knew somebody too tough to fuck with, then grab
a couple drafts and sit beside the shuffleboard to wait for a
game. He was a rough old bird. When I went to jail that first
time for fighting he said I only bought the time because I
won and if push came to shove in there to “eat mutton, say
nuttin’.” He’d done a few stretches himself a few years back so
my twelve days were nothing but he was waiting when I came
back with a yellow ribbon wrapped around the doorknob to
my room and he laughed like hell when I saw it and then he
bought me a beer. “You’re bigger than this,” he said. “You got
more in you.” I nodded even though I didn’t understand what
he meant or saw in me and when I left there to chase summer
across Canada in a beat-up car I bought for a hundred bucks
he stood and watched and waved until I disappeared around
the curve. No one had ever waved goodbye before and I had
to hold tight to the wheel and set my chin to the country
and drive and drive and drive until the bruised feeling waned
into something grey and manageable. Almost forty years later
I think I understand. Bards sometimes sit in crummy rooms
scoffing a six pack and a hoagie, smoking roll-yer-owns and
waiting for the man to come with dreams in a baggie, betting
horses and drowning in old mariner tales. It’s not all just
about glory and the shiny people who make it to the top.
What makes this country tick for kids like I was then are guys
like Huk, tough as hell and scrambling for a dollar, taking
love on the installment plan, givin’ ’er the best they can and
letting young guys know they got better in them because