and there’s nothing I can say but nod and smoke
and stare at the Nipigon River rushing south
beyond the peninsula and out into
the broad purple dream of Lake Superior
we ate sardines and crackers and drank warm ale
in the cab of that beat-up truck
and he asked me questions about myself
that I didn’t hold the answers to and he
would nod his head and rub the dashboard
in small gentle circles with the pad
of one finger and smile sadly
“I come here to find myself” he said
“and it was not even yet my home
and here it’s been yours all along
and still we make the same journey”
he dropped me off outside of Thunder Bay
in the chill and wet of morning
handed me thirty crumpled dollars
and said “come back and work by god”
and waved and drove away for food
supplies and a host of Finnish friends
and I stood alone
on the shoulder of another deserted highway
waiting, that summer of ’74, and wishing
that I might make it back someday but
both of us knowing
that I never would
III
in Shebandowan the miners drive
their Cats into town to drink
with Ojibway kids
on the run from Kaministiquia
or Shabaqua or Atitkokan
roll them cigarettes one-handed
tell them horror stories of the mines
then let them win at pool
so they can get them drunk and laugh
there’s something about a D8 Cat
that gives a man a sense of power
and maybe that’s what they chase
so they don’t have to think
of home and women and kids
or ordinary shit like that
they drink as they live
hard and fast, two-fisted
as if they could blow the foamy head
from all the tomorrows
and never heed the darkness
that walks with them
in the depths
instead they sit and drink and cuss
arm wrestle and brag
and leer at the Indian girls
until someone hollers “squaw”
and the fight breaks out
well, I heard all their stories
then I drank their beer for nothing
before kicking ass at pool
and thumbing out of town
with a pocketful of their money
IV
Riding out of Elkhorn with a gang of transients in the back of
a stake truck after stooking wheat for ten days in the Manitoba
heat. There’s easier ways to make a buck but you take what
you can get when the Rambler Typhoon breaks down in the
middle of nowhere and the Mounties shake you awake by the
foot sleeping behind the Esso and give you the choice of “jail
or job.” Still, the food was good and when the guy beside you
asks you for a smoke you give him one because he told a real
good one about Cape Breton one night around the fire that
made you laugh like hell. The gang of you headed west.
Their names are gone but you recall the places: Come By
Chance, Sissiboo Falls, Moosehorn, Snag and Wandering
River. They were Russian, French, German, English, Inuit,
Swede and Blackfoot and everyone came with stories that
crackled with the light of the fire outside the bunk house
and there were songs sung all guttural and low while goatskins
got passed along with the last of someone’s hash and you
could look up and see the moon hung like a blind man’s eye
throwing everything in that prairie night into a mazy, snowy
blue that made each of those tales a portal you stepped
through as easily as breathing until the voices stilled and
the fire died and the lot of you stumbled to your bunks to
dream of better days somewhere beyond the dry rasp of wheat
and the press of heat like an iron to your back and clouds of
chaff in your nose. You smoke and watch the land sail by and
wonder where you’ll land next and someone bumps your foot
with the toe of a broken shoe and grins and you hand off the
butt and watch him lean his head back against the wooden
slat and exhale long and slow, the cloud of it vanishing back
heard of before.
V
She kept an old and battered Bible
on the table made of packing crates
and drank Indian tea from metal cups
poured from a pot dangled
over a birch log fire
in the stone hearth that held
black and white photos of her children
and her husband all long gone
the edges scalloped, curled and yellowed
and medals from the Indian school
for penmanship and spelling
she lived in Eden Valley
in the shadows of the foothills for so long
she said, the hills became her bones
and she watched the reservation change
as the Old Ones like her died away
and the young ones drifted off
chasing city dreams and left their talk behind
but she taught me how to build a sweat
and sing an honour song to the breaking
day and to lay tobacco down when
we walked across the land to gather
the sweet grass and the sage
she taught me how to pray with
“always ask for nothing” she told me
“just give thanks for what’s already here,
that’s how an Indyun prays”
she told me stories
legends and amazing tales
of creatures and spirits and times before
things changed forever for the Stoney
and how the nuns at the residential schools
taught them how to scour everything
even the Indian off themselves
“then why the Bible?” I asked
and she smiled and took my hand
in both of hers like elders do
“because Jesus wept” she said
it took me years to finally get it
and when I did I looked up to the sky
and said thanks for everything that was
and is and ever would be
because Jesus wept
in gratitude for pain
and the salvation that comes
with the acceptance of it
when you learn to hold it
you can learn to let it go
it’s how an Indian prays
VI
Looking out across the lake and seeing
how the mist seems to hold it all together
so that even the loon calls seem connected
to the side of the mountain standing
tall and proud as a chief
or a medicine woman
the forest dropping to the shore
like the fringes of buckskin the stone
of the cliff at the turn of the lake
a shining bead in the flare of the rising sun
it all comes together of its own accord
and all you can do is stand here
and take it in and hold it like a breath
you never want to exhale
these radiant shining moments
that have come to be the foundation
of your time here
&nb
sp; when you think of this country now
it becomes as perfect as this vista
this lake and these mountains stunning
in the magnitude of the force of them
resting together on the power of detail
like when you watch your wife cutting
glass for the art she forms with a kiln
seeing how the minute bits of silica
fused together become something more
by virtue of the vision she has
of their wholeness
her story began on a convict ship bound
for the shores of Western Australia
and continued in the buying and the selling
of her great-grandmother on a Fremantle dock
a West Indian black whose face you see
in the line of her face when the light
catches it just so or the direct way
she has of looking at you telling you
with the strength of that level gaze
that the chains that bind her to the past
are forged from love and the knowledge
that her story, her life, is not just what
you see but the sum of its parts
like a lake shining at the foot of a mountain
your story began in a residential school
in northwestern Ontario where your family
was hung upon a cross of doctrine
that said to save the child they must
kill the Indian first — and did almost
except that you were born
in a canvas army tent in a trap-line camp
set beside the crooked water of the Winnipeg River
tucked in a cradleboard on a bed of spruce and cedar
hearing the Old Talk cooed and whispered
by the grandmother who could not save
you in the end from being
scooped away and taken to a white world
where the Indian was scraped away
and the rawness and the woundings
at your belly seeped and bled
their poisons into you for years
both of you adopted
removed
from the shelter of arms
that held you first
the story of you edited
by crude punctuation
and the journeys that you took from there
led you to extraordinary places of dark
and light and all shades in between
the acts of discovery and reclamation
adding to the image you hold now
both of you willing to tell it to each other
so that you know that what makes you stronger
is the coming together of those stories
the union of your lives the harmony that happens
when the weave of things is allowed to blend
all on its own accord
a confluence of energy and spirit
that the Old Ones say occurs without any help from us
the detail of things defined by Creator’s purpose
and fused together into wholeness
like a lake shining at the foot of a mountain
so you look across this stretch of Canada
and it’s as if you can feel the whole of it
shimmer beneath your feet like the locomotive
thunder of a hundred thousand hooves of buffalo
charging into history
or the skin of a great drum beating
carried in the feet of young men dancing
grasses flat for the gathering of people
come to celebrate the sun
and the wind that blows across the water
becomes the same wind that blew across
the gritty, dusty faces of settler folk freed
from the yoke of Europe the tribe of them
following the creak of wagon wheels
forward into a history shared
by diverse peoples with wondrous stories
told around fires
that kept them sheltered from the night
so maybe this is what it comes to mean
this word, this name, this Kanata
the Huron word for village that has
come to mean “our home”
maybe in the end it’s a word for one fire
burning where a circle of people gathers
to hear the stories that define them
VII
Listen. They are with us. They are standing with us even now,
at your shoulder while you gather nets, forge steel, harvest
crops, lay roads, build houses, tend homes, raise children
or stalk moose through a muskeg bog. Can you not feel the
comforting presence of them watching over you? Can you
not feel the weight of an old and wrinkled hand upon your
shoulder or your brow? They are with us whether you believe
in them or not. The Old Ones. The ancestors. Spirit Beings
who have travelled onward, outward into the Spirit World
bearing with them the memories, the recollections and the
love they found here in this world, on this land, hovered over
you, telling you by the gift of intuition that they are here and
always will be. Can you not feel the truth of that? We are the
story of our time here they have come to say, and in the end
it is all we carry forward and all we leave behind. Our story.
Everything we own. Spin a grand tale then. Separately but
together leave the greatest story that you can for those who
come behind you. This is what they say and this is what they
wish. Nothing is truly separate. Every one and every thing
carries within it the spark of Creation and exists on the sacred
breath of that Creation. So that we are all related, we are
family, we are kin. Every story carries within it the seed of a
thousand others and it is only in the coming together that
we discover the truth of that and know that we are home.
Elder 1
At night he’d sit and smoke an old cob pipe
the glow of it in the dark throwing
his face into orange cliffs and dark canyons
of knowing with each drawn breath
like how a September wind can
freeze a man’s face in the channel
between Minaki and Gun Lake or how
a cattail root can keep a man alive
when there’s nothing else
or how to boil a cedar root
to fashion rope and waterproof the seams
of a tent or a canoe with the residue
sometimes he just talked
and the roll of it would carry me
beyond this world into the places
where stories are born
and a culture sprang from what
a storyteller saw in the shape and form
of a rock, say, or the shadow thrown
by the lean of a tree
it wasn’t teaching
not in the strictest sense
he offered his experience
a canvas tent set among the trees
overlooking a cove at One Man Lake
where a fire burned in a pot-bellied stove
and the smell of cedar boughs and spruce
wafted through the aroma
of hard black tea and sweet grass
and the aged ones sat on stump chairs
grinning at you all awkward in the doorway
saying “peendigaen, peendigaen”
come in, come in
he’d talk for hours sometimes
and when he was finished
he’d take one last draw on the old cob pipe
and the light would flare like a tribal fire on a distant hill
then I’d hear him thunk it on a log and rise
to shuffle
off to his tent
and allow the night to fall
Grandfather Talking — Whitedog Dam
them they didn’t know
how much they come to hurt us with that dam
never seen how it could be
they just come and built their concrete wall
and stopped that water, pushed it back into a lake
where Creator never intended no lake to be
and them they never knew it was our blood, our life
was just a river to them, just a thing they could use
and they watched as the land got swallowed up by it
all the trees, all the rocks that marked
the end of one family’s trapline from another
and the teachin’ stones where our grandfathers painted
visions and prayer songs there
all drowned and covered up from our view
so that a part of us was drowned forever too
but them they never seen that
all them sacred places got washed away
not the big ceremonial places I mean
I mean them places where the hearts of our people
come to live forever
the bend above the rapids where I stretched my nets
when I was young and where I kissed your Gokum
that first time, oh that was a good one that one
so good, my boy, I felt that river inside me then
deep an’ cool it was and me I felt like
I was never gonna be thirsty no more on accounta that kiss
and that bend in the river there
that’s the kind of places they let sink away
spirit places I mean to say
where our spirits come alive, each of us, all of us
where we learned to live
them they never seen that
all they seen was that dam them
the push of the river against them big wheels inside
bringin’ out what they call the hydro
but the word they use for it is power
and them they couldn’t see that
that was what they drowned
Fresh Horses
Out of the alleys rumpled kings emerge
rolling cigarettes cadged from butts one-handed
and hitching up their pants with the other