Northrop County
In the late November wind
the sky grows
grey, fades awkwardly.
Toward the lakeshore
the condominiums stay
and shit like unsettled geese.
From 30 stories up
the traffic from the expressway’s
little more than a rumour –
it travels like the sighs
of voyageurs
but comes up occasionally
in dreams
or dinner conversations.
The lift’s more real.
It carries the heart’s truth
under its shoulder
like a bag of supplies
from the convenience store.
The evening tilts into dusk
like a bottle of wine on the counter.
Dropping in at the annual festival
It’s a wooden-wheel hearse I realize
behind three women of an earlier time
on guitar and the young fiddle player on the rise
in the rear of the historic museum
on a rainy day in Malpeque, PEI,
fresh oysters waiting to be shucked,
mussels steaming in stainless steel pots,
wind easy, rain falling straight down
on the gathered
mostly locals with a few from other provinces
and here we are, the two of us, in this country that draws
us like flies to the honey pot,
The Miramichi
He stands in the river, again trying
to cast just right, to lay the fly out
there, in the eddy. He’s been tying
flies for longer than his painful bouts
with arthritis, longer than his wife’s
desires to change him. Oh he has doubts
about love, about the river named life,
but here, where water ...
* poem, in its entirety, is available in the printed version of the current issue.
Elegy to my friend the accountant
You took the passwords and mental strongboxes with you,
the money numbers and the backstory. Your being
was the illusion of my safety.
Tiredness is not going away for any of us back here
on the ground. The world keeps spinning
and suffering. When I open my ears, the woe flows in.
Where does the energy come from?
I don’t have it. I am it.
So are you.
I swear to God, there’s a new bud
coming out of the .....
* poem, in its entirety, is available in the printed version of the current issue.
It felt good.
It felt good.
Photographs of Lake Superior
Was that really sheer, unfettered
unadulterated joy I saw
in those photographs
from a decade ago?
When you were thinner
when I was thinner, and the kids
were truly children acting childish
on the Precambrian rock
that was older than time?
* poem, in its entirety, is available in the printed version of the current issue.
