The Swarm (Québec, 1742)

Winter had fallen, timid and mild,

The herbage springing fulsome and bold:

The apples and maples

Powder pink and fluorescent lime.

Bronze sinews bathed in brine

Salted the sun-baked grass

As the blackbird blared its summer siren.

The habitants’ fields splayed like a fish’s spine

Out of the great River

Whose whisper lulled work-hot heads to sleep.

Ti Yann, hilling squash, came upon a cowbird

And starlings six that lazed upon the shadowed dust.

They startled, but made no flight.

He thought of pie and fricassee

But, seized with the peasant’s eye for omen,

Crossed himself, said “Hail Mary.”

The sun set living flesh to broil;

The farmers in the corn slowed, looked up from their toil

Awaiting the cool hiss of the breeze

That they reckoned rustling in the tallest poplars’ leaves

And waited…and the air was still.

Gazing at the windbreak trees

They saw them doff their crowns,

Foliage sinking as sand in a timer-glass.

Leaning on their tools, they stood bewildered,

Agape at the woods

As gaunt as a cruel December.

In the bones of their toes they felt through the soil

That the grasses and the goldenrod

As if by some witch’s art

Had begun to seethe and boil.

Impelled by unbridled hunger

It came towards them,

A billion knotted bodies

Wrought into one consciousness.

They saw and felt It squirming;

Some swore they heard triumphant squeals;

Some fled to the town, whose whitewashed walls

Were writhing black and brown;

Some fled their Reason;

The lucky reached the boats.

To the very shore It came

As if menace was compassed in Its mind.

Those safe on the ships shook in wonder

At how the Land could sudden bear

More life than it had substance

And mocked themselves as mad

While the solem prêtres prayed

To Dieu for deliverance.

Seventeen hundred and forty-two

Says the musty tome in quill-penned scrawl—

Back when Intendant Hocquart’s hand

Ruled feebly a wild and forbidding land.

Robarts keeps it on a reference shelf.

Leaving that book-lined dungeon,

The City looms fresh and bright;

The soul relaxes in Metro’s vibrant bustle,

But the leaves of the campus maples

Shimmer disconcertingly

In the windless noonday light.