they learned somehow to see contrast through the gloom.
Well Huk, I got ’er now. Pass it on the best you can because
what you know is what you know, and you’re a richer man
for seein’ what you seen and a port in the fog is still a port.
If you’re gone now and cold and reaching out for one last
beer, my guess is that you’ll make it . . .
Tin Roof
I heard Fats Waller play one night
when the rain beat upon the slatted tin roof
of a cabin set against the rib of bush
somewhere beyond what I’d come to know as time
a wobbly candle flame
set the hornet’s nest in the corner into motion
it danced in the magic of that night
that flame, that piano
and I fell in love with the 1920s
the simplicity of line and time and metre
and how it fit with rain
beating on a tin roof
a thousand tiny heartbeats like mine
surrendered to lonely
there are dreams that come to men as I was then
nomadic, transient, rootless, afraid perhaps
that time was like the road
always in front of you and never truly here
those dreams were visions and the quest of them
was what lifted a thumb to waggle and hook at cars
bearing hard for Winnipeg, Swift Current
then the foothills and the mountains tumbling down
to wide expanse of ocean
that was itself a dream dropped beyond the horizon
that itself was never really here
dreams of how the warmth of skin might feel
beneath a calloused palm
the cleft and cliff and scarp of bone
and hair and the smell of living
riding on each softly exhaled breath
in time suspended
and dreams of talk
the syllables of truth spilled off lips and tongue and teeth
to fill the air between us like clouds
roiling and turning and tumbling
with the energy of souls who have just discovered
that freedom rings best on turns of phrase that say
“I see you here” and “stay”
and dreams of lawns and things
the idle clutter that sits like islands in the stream of our living
redolent with history and song
like Waller’s piano against the dark and the tattoo of rain
on that tin roof in the bush so far removed
from the light that breaks over things you’ve built
by hand
and heart
and hope
and dreams of time held in the hand
inspected with the gaping look of wonder
that you see on children’s faces
when they become surprised by the ordinary
and dreams of sound and smell
the taste of things like the lilt of fresh baked bread
and the spot of skin just behind the ear
that holds within it the taste of many things
like faith and home and love
and the sound of spirits dancing in the ripple of curtains
in a window overlooking a yard
where flowers bloom in pots
where we dirtied our fingers and joined the earth to us again
I heard Fats Waller play as the rain pelted down
against an old tin roof and didn’t know
that I dreamed of you
I can’t hear that old piano now
without a sense of loss and celebration for this man
who found his way to you
down the road that led to the line in the sky
that led in course to the ocean
of our dreams come true
right here, right now, this room
where the feel of your skin against my palm
pulses like a simple line in a simple time and simple metre
like rain on the tin roof of my soul
Scars
The back of my head is pocked and marred
with scars I mostly don’t remember getting
one time I fell in a drunken haze
against rocks along the Bow River
and opened myself severely
no stitches though, that would have been weak
and two-fisted gulpers as I was then
had no time for namby-pamby baby things
in a seam to stem the flow of blood
I wear my hair short these days
and new barbers comment on the bare field
of it beneath the hair like a landing strip for pain
“musta been a whack” they say
and me in not so subtle denial have been
known to say “yeah, but chicks dig it”
the truth is
that I don’t know that they do
bad boys create their own mythologies
in order to cope with frailty and failings
as though faulty legends and tall tales could replace
the truth of things in matters of the heart
Paul Bunyan outranks Tiny Tim
in our minds only and women get that
and it’s the measure of our lack
that buffoons as I was didn’t
I do now
but of course, I’m far more sensitive at fifty-five
than I was at twenty-three and time has a way
of bringing you to your knees
at the shrine of your own undoing
hell, even outlaws learn to cry if they listen
to themselves long enough
and there are a lot of cellblocks with tear stained pillows
clenched in tattooed fists
anyone or anything I ever fought
was only me in disguise
I get that now just as I’ve learned
that reaching out takes a lot more guts
than pushing away
and tall tales are better saved for firesides
when hurt’s involved
there are scars from knives and bats and fists
that create a map of everywhere I fell
without knowing that I did
and there are scars from falling on broken bottles
careless work with tools and simple
drunken buffoonery that I eased with lies
because the truth was so embarrassing
my skin is broken territory
and my heart went along for the ride
but I’ve learned to see my scars as something
far more telling than the fables and tall tales
I created just to manage having been an idiot
more than a handful of times over time
because stitches and the billboards of bare spots
only mark the places I deserted myself
in my search for rest
outlaws in their hideouts dream
of a gentle touch and curtains
far more often
than they give away
Grammar Lesson
There’s a silence words
leave in their wake
once they’re spoken
that’s the true punctuation
of our lives
like
when I said “I love you”
the full colon stop
made my heart ache
until you continued
the phrase and said
dash
“I love you too”
period
Voyageurs
for Anne Doucette and Michael Findlay
Dvorak wrote the “Serenade for Strings”
in just twelve days and trudging through
the snow drifts along the bluffs above
the Nor
th Saskatchewan River with Saskatoon
huffing its breath across the frozen fling
of it in the valley, the violas sashay
in waltz time through the headphones
and I tuck my chin closer to my chest
and walk in counterpoint to the edge
and gaze in rapt wonder at the skill of
this Czech composer and the hand of Creator
at work together in the same morning
twinkling with frost
the river current buckled ice and sent
shards of it upward hard into a January
sky pale blue as a sled dog’s eye
and the ice crystals in the air wink
in the sun like spirits dancing
so that Dvorak’s masterpiece becomes
a divertimento to the history that clings
to the banks of this river and there’s
something in the caesura that harkens
to a voyageur’s song perhaps when
this river bore stout-hearted strangers
into places where only the Cree
and the buffalo could last the bitter
snap of the Long Snow Moons
and starvation was the only verb
in a language built on nouns
crows hop across the drifts
like eighth notes and the larghetto
when it eases in as wistful as a
prayer for home becomes the idea
that we’re all voyageurs really
paddling relentlessly for points beyond
what we’ve come to know of ourselves
and time and the places we occupy
so that history whether it comes
in a serenade, a fugue, a chanson
or a chant sung with drums
made of deer hide becomes
the same song eventually and rivers
like this contain it
hold it, shape it to us
so it rides loose and easy
on our shoulders
Dvorak wrote the “Serenade” in 1875
and turning to the city now
marching to the beat of the teeth
of the wind that churns upward
suddenly out of the valley
Saskatoon becomes the everywhere
of my experience and I ride the current of it
to the resolution of the theme
Paul Lake Morning
from the deck you watch over coffee as everywhere
shadow surrenders to light
there’s a motion to it, a falling back
as though the world were being pushed
into daylight shapes again
the boundaries of things assuming
their more familiar proportions
so that from here you get the sense of the universe
shrugging its shoulders into wakefulness
all things together
you come here to be part of it
this ceremony of morning, this first light
they call Beedahbun in the Old Talk
you can feel it enter you
the light pouring into the cracks
and crevices of your being
even with your eyes closed the wash
of it like surf against your ribs and the air
crisp as icicles on your tongue
there’s gentleness in this slow sure creep into being
and something in you reacts to that
needs it, wants it, dreamt it sometime
so that the sun’s ebullient cascade
down the pine-pocked flank of mountain
becomes the first squawk and natter of ravens
in the high branches of fir where the wind
soughs like the exhalation of a great bear
raising her snout in salute and celebration
to this Great Mystery presenting itself again
Nindinaway-majahnee-dog is what the Anishinabeg say
and when that language was reborn in you
that phrase more than anything adhered to your insides
all my relations
this is what you see from here
this connectedness to things, this critical joining that becomes
a revelation, a prayer and an honour song all at the same time
a blessing, really, that someone cared enough
to come and find you in your wandering
and bring you home to it, to ritual, to history
to language and the teachings you’ve learned to see
and hear and taste and feel and intuit in everything
this ceremony of becoming
that morning brings you to again
you become Ojibway
like the way you become a Human Being
measure by measure, step by step
on a trail blazed by the hand of grace
every awakening a reclaiming of the light
you were born to
The Canada Poem
I
Listen. Can you not hear the voices of the Old Ones talking,
speaking to you in the language you’ve forgotten? In your
quietest moments can you not feel the weight of an old and
wrinkled hand upon your shoulder or your brow? Listen.
Close your eyes and listen and tell me if you cannot hear the
exhalation of a collected breath from your ancestors in the
spirit world standing here beside you even now. Listen.
They are talking. They speak to you in Dene, Cree, Micmac,
Blackfoot, Ojibway and Inuktitut but they also speak
Hungarian, German, Gaelic, Portuguese, French, Mandarin
and English. The voices of the Old Ones. The ones who
made this country speak to us now because there is no colour
in the spirit world, no skin. Just as there is no time, there is
no history. There’s only spirit, only energy flowing outward,
onward in a great eternal circle that includes every soul that’s
ever stood upon this land, embraced this Earth, been borne
forward on this Creation and then fallen head over heels in
love with the spell of this country. Listen. They are speaking
to all of us now, telling us that we’re all in this together — and
we always were. Listen. Only listen and you will hear them.
They speak in the hard bite of an Atlantic wind across Belle
Isle, in the rush of Nahanni waters, in the pastoral quiet over
Wynyard, in the waft of thermals climbing over Revelstoke
and Field to coast down and settle over Okotoks, then again
in the salt spray of Haida Gwaii, the screech of an eagle over
the wide blue eye of the lake called Great Bear and in the
crackle, swish and snap of Northern Lights you can hear in
the frigid air above Pangnirtung. They speak to us there.
Listen. Listen. There are spirit voices talking, weaving threads
of disparate stories into one great aural tapestry of talk that
will outlast us all — the story of a place called Kanata that has
come to mean “our home.”
II
sitting with Earl in the cab of his truck
the ’65 Mercury all banged to hell
from running woodlot roads and hauling
boats and motors through bogs and swamps
to landings the Ojibway said were there
and where the jack and pickerel lurked
in the depths beyond the bass at the reeds
“more’n yuh could shake a stick at,” he said
and laughed and rubbed a calloused palm
along the windshield and talked about how
“this old girl, she done seen her day but she
still got go in her by god” and laughs again
and talks about his wife and him
coming here in t
he late summer of 1949
fresh off failed farmland outside of Milton
and determined to find waters like those
he fished as a boy in Finland and laughs
and tells me about pike longer than his arm
pulled out of the Ruunaa Rapids
and how this country here takes him back
even the smell of it he says and that’s why
they come to build a fishing lodge here
because the Nipigon River runs like the
River Lieksanjoki of his youth and “by god
we got brook trout break da goddam arm sometimes”
he tells of building the lodge on the rocks
above a wide bend in the river
and how his wife came to love the feel
of the wind on her face those nights
when the work was done and she’d sit
in the willow rocker he built her
set under the eaves on the rough-hewn deck
and sing him Finnish folk songs
while he sat drinking tea and staring
out across the sweep of land
that reminded him so much of home
until one by one the stars winked
into view and they would move into the house
to lie awake to watch the moon shadow
creep across the log walls until sleep came and swept
them both away to Kuopio and the waters
they still loved as much as these
Anna-Liisa he says quietly and rubs
at the corner of an eye before he speaks again
she passed away three years before I met him
and he talks of laying her to rest
beneath the towering pines that hung
above the cleft of pink granite where
she planted wildflowers in the cracks and crevices
and he set that old willow rocker on those rocks
so he could go out of an evening and sit
and talk to her and sing old Finnish folk songs
while he watched the sun go down
“it’s her land now by god” he says
“and my land too because of where she sleeps”