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So we’re mostly back where we were, including me and my family. My backyard is on the water, though, and Utopia still sits there on the far shore. I bought a telescope a while back. If you look through it you can see people there, walking on their shore, and they look like us …

Necessity says I must be careful
as I stand in the tangle of weeds
to place my feet on solid ground
and not on a broken window pane

though I hold up the empty frame,
careful to let the spiders fall,
and cautious not to cut my hands
as I try to see what I overlooked.

This collapsing barn on the Ninth Concession
still has swallows in its hay-spewed loft
and the frame’s a gateway,
to escape this moment,
a pathway to a different place
with fields of goldenrod and cricket calls –

I remember the Old Colony, a 1950s dance hall on Portugal Cove Road, less than a kilometre from where we grew up on Bell’s Turn in a 1,300-square-foot house built by my father using cinder blocks pilfered from the Pinetree Line Cold War station at Red Cliff. Not much left of the old radar station today. Nothing left of the house on Bell’s Turn either. Knocked down to make way for the Outer Ring. And not a trace left of the Old Colony. A fire razed the building. But in its place, a phoenix has risen up where my parents once waltzed.

Tapping in the high branches of our oak
woke me early and I got out of bed
to see who broke a town ordinance
and started work before sunrise.

A black and white woodpecker
was feasting on moth eggs.

The moths were bad this year,
and next year could be worse,
though the sound reminded me
of television footage –
miners trapped a mile underground
and all that saved them was incessant tapping,
the desire to be heard, their hands bloodied
clutching jagged stones.

It can be difficult to get the news from trees.
Canny vegetable sphinxes,
they know so much more than they let on.
Like stones and secret agents,
you can break them with axes,
but they will never spill the beans.

In storms, trees chat up a storm.
It’s all a rustling gibberish meant to confuse you.
In the fall, their parti-coloured leaves are pages
in a book you’ll flip through casually but will not read.
Hug their shag-barked trunks, they won’t hug back.

Stamped down but not-yet-
sullied snow on February streets –
startled & heartened by the small
magnolia tree’s comma-shaped
buds, thick at the head & tapering
at the tail, their grey plumpness.

A nod of thanks to these promises.