I was late arriving at the Thai House, perched up there on concrete posts above 7th Avenue, mainly because the 5th Avenue Theatre crowd took up all the parking for blocks. It was a Smart Car, oddly, that saved me - the two-thirds of a parking space it didn’t need was enough room for my antique Toyota. The evening was mild, a few leaves rolling on the street. The restaurant was cluttered, bright, warm, a contrast with the calm outdoors. I scanned the long room for my friends, and found them in a corner booth. Roselyne had called the night before, in town for a workshop, and Marc was in town too, so we arranged to meet for our customary three-times-a-year dinner. “Bring some poems,” she said. Beryl was there, too, the friend Roselyne stays with when she’s in town, due to the proximity of her home to downtown. Smiles and hugs, and the usual quick catch-up talk, these are people I’ve known thirty years, so we don’t have to say much. The appetizers arrived, steaming crab cakes, spring rolls, satay, and Roselyne asked for “Albert, Faded.” She and Marc have known Albert as long as I have, and it’s a scary thing to present a description of a common friend, all liberties intact, but they seemed to like it - the silence spoke volumes. Then “Willow River” - I brought these poems of the north, knowing they’d relate to the settings - and I found out that the bridge is no longer there, wiped out by the river in a spring flood, replaced by a concrete “temporary” bridge, and now I feel the burden of the historian. Finally, “Numb”, because they know the deep deep winter it describes. The stricken looks on their faces, the still moment . . . . “My god, you guys, wait till I read the ones about my mother’s death!” We laughed. We ordered dinner.
Albert, Faded
A lifetime of hayfield turns fallow when
he forgets to ask the neighbours’ help.
The heifers miss the twinkle of his
injured eye, the fractured tooth,
the fidget. The fields roll and roll,
as always, the bailer follows
the rake follows the mower. We
once followed too, the heft of bails
in July, and Fern’s meals.
How strange we must have felt
to him, our frivolous degrees and
the fever of winter cabin fires.
Blow the beaver dam, he showed
us how, sheer the ram and take his
balls for breakfast. Laughed when
we thought too much about it.
He wasn’t much for talk; still,
we knew him, by his easy smile,
the small hello, the offered hand,
the willingness for work to shuffle
to a stop, just to stand there.
Five words would seal a deal, our labour
for his lumber, our homes impossible
without him. His the horse that raised
the logs, his the wood that planked
the floor. He works them still, the mill,
the hills, but tales repeat themselves,
and memories flee like weather.
The Shelley Road is less than fertile
now, the visits rare, the daughters
grown far from the farm. He fades
like straw, furrowed and sodden with
rain and the bleach of few fine days.
--
--
The Willow River
I come here when I need a change
from the still brown chill
of the Mudslide lake,
to sit in sun-warmed eddies,
the surge of water like a breeze
on the skin in August heat.
I come here so the kids can play,
divert the current
with channels and dams,
wade into safe water,
splash baked bodies.
I come to mingle with the wives
and the riffraff
of rural life on a dusty beach
rife with debris: cigarette stubs
and popsicle sticks.
I come because the horseflies
stay behind. We have our log
to lean against, the blanket spread,
the sun at our backs.
Overhead, the Willow Bridge
a wooden trestled single lane
slings angled shadows on the sand.
And when they cross,
the thunder of logging trucks,
the jake brake jitterbug,
drowns the sound of sibilant river,
the shouts of moms and kids,
sends showers of dust through cracks
between bleached planks,
sparkling into sunlight.
Lanky boys climb the girders
and leap from that deck,
into water way too shallow.
My ears are perked
for the scream I fear, the kid
who plummets too fast too deep,
but they bomb the water
volley after volley
of laughing cannonballs.
Later, on the radio, I hear
a boy has died. His body,
knifelike and gleaming, sliced that river
to the bone.
Numb
Fresh snow covered the granular old
in the sleepless morning
of you gone to be with her.
A mile of unplowed crunch to the road,
to the clatter of trucks and their loads
- toothpicks, we called them, peelers for the pulp mill -
sulfurous stench dense
on the currents north from town,
I trudged, barely able to breathe.
On a snow bank
high above the washboard ice,
inconspicuous, I hoped,
not to be broadcast on radios by loggers
thirsty for a story, I waited
for the blue pick-up skitter around the bend.
You saw me, and knew
that despite all pretense,
my hurt was as high as the snowfall,
as long as the wait till spring.
I couldn’t feel the bite of ten below,
didn’t hear the clunk of chunks of snow
or the crack of snags split by ice.
If the sky was blue it was shrouded,
my grief beyond repair.
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