I met a man in a grease-grimed diner –
A grey, and hunched, and trout-eyed miner –
And offered a bottle if he’d regale
Stone-bored travellers with some age-steeped local tale.
An evil thirst impelled to slake,
He grinned, and twitched, and whisp’ring spake:
“Far from the City’s neon glare,
Where rise the peaks, ‘neath whose icy stare
Sourdough and coolie panned for gold,
A lake reposes, still and cold.
No mapbook marks its oozing shore,
Known but to time-dimmed Native lore;
An unclaimed stake of prairie loam,
Where the aspens quake in the breezeless gloam
At the edge of a low and level plain
Whose soil yields not fruit nor grain.
Truckers who pass the vap’rous glade
Tell of shadows that dance in black spruce’ shade;
No bird alights; no fawn does drink
From that stygian well of living ink.
The scaly birch and gall-skinned oak,
Ne’er shaking off last winter’s cloak,
Brood o’er banks, whose gummy clay and feathered reeds
Conspire to secret unhallowed deeds.
There, lone and shunned, its piles half sank
‘Mid the vines and mud, so queerly rank,
A cottage stands, whose windows leer,
Unblinking, at the lurid meer.
Hurry home, ere the red sun’s sunk and gone
And the moon ‘pon that glassy water shone,
Lest in those windows you glimpse a glow
That no fire, nor moon, nor lamp could throw.
If yet you should tarry, and gaze within the bog,
One look will see you vanish, wailing through the fog.”
High in a sky as faience blue
An orb like molten copper glows
Whose fire long chased the morning dew
Off milkweed, thistle, meadow rose;
Cardinal’s call, cicada’s whine
From berry bush and wild-grape vine
Echoes off pine-crowned roadside hill
Where currants ripe, baskets to fill;
Beyond the wood, the Lake beach reeks
Of hot dogs, beer and firework smoke;
The muskrats toil in sun-warmed creeks,
And dragonfly and Mourning Cloak
Dance and whirl, while the barred owl seeks
Soft repose in his hollowed oak
And tree-worms rest in elm-wood bower
Through blist’ring, buzzing mid-noon hour.
A busy bee – no rest for she –
Alights upon a gilt-plumed reed,
The goldenrod which bounds the lea,
So that her kin might thereof feed;
Spies she not that velvety bead?
Yellow, splashed pink, and tense with need –
The eyes, all eight, which gleam with greed?
No shadowed trap, nor silken snare –
‘Tis Beauty forms a murd’rer’s lair.
Lightning claws pounce from living bloom;
A poisoned bite thus seals her doom
While breeze-gusts in the verge-scrub play
Furtive whispers; a Summer’s day.
Where the Don and Humber carved their way
Down to the Lake, through grey and iron clay
Shone Cities six, spires of ice in fleeting winter day.
Rich and teeming, provincial indulgence
Painting ikons in Boreal effulgence;
As the riptide unseen surging,
Shoreside eminence, so fast emerging,
That absence – four years’ span –
Made native son a stranger-man.
Where sprang one at eve came two at morrow
Out from tarry field and concrete furrow;
Ambition’s airy dust spread o’er seeds of sorrow.
Like moths in the firelight of LED dreams,
Trusting all is thrice what it seems,
The beacon spire,
Polychrome with flameless fire,
Drew them in from all aroun’;
From fishing port and fact’ry town;
From orchard groves in Niagara’s lee
And grave-dark woods, where voyageur and Cree
Stalked the prize beaver by the edge of an inland sea,
And beneath a chilling iv’ry moon
The Shield-rock echoes the mournful loon.
No amber yield of the prairie loam;
No silv’ry haul from th’Atlantic gloam
Shored the roots of that swordless Rome.
No gold, no silver its custom paid,
Electric notions their code of trade
Of which a virtue their suited prophets made;
Their wages – not but toil –
Feeding fruits born of no earthen soil.
Tho’ hearts a’weary and credit spent,
Higher yet, their steely piles upward went;
Higher yet, their seedy hutches’ rent.
Tho’ swarm-sick souls sought far exiles;
Tho’ the saccharine maple fled their planted aisles,
They scaled the skies and sealed the ground, rooves pressed close like floortop tiles.
In relict towns,
Faces limned with careworn frowns,
Old folk huffed and crowed
But stemmed not their children’s outward flow;
Hearth-fires paled to deathly white
Before the awesome, opiate light
That drunks the halls of sleepless night.
Bearing envy of courage and fame,
They changed each honoured, ancient name;
They toppled knights of marble and bishops in bronze
To spare the ‘feels’ of haughty pawns.
In Council void of counsel, in the brooding crescent hall,
They quaffed the wine of grapes of gall,
Bittermost at budget time, in the waning of the Fall.
The suburbs suffered; their war-chest grew,
And lines long faded again they drew,
Cleaving the city new from out the City true,
On minivan and lawn, heaped value-rated pains,
Yet sent forth not the promised subway trains,
For “tax-cattle be damned, give Us our cycling lanes!”
History’s voices could not implore;
Their spot was the spot of their children no more.
Could they foresee this lost generation –
Their sacred joy in cold privation,
Their perverse and crooked recreation?
In Future’s web blindly caught,
Elder wisdom proud forgot,
Yesterday came an unkenned nought.
No Cassandra wailing doom
Is needful when barely rents a room
A grand – four walls of glazeless gloom.
Worst of all, they forgot the time
When northbound rains beat doleful rhyme
And lake and river wreaked wrath sublime.
A sage of the sidewalk, left cruelly free,
Who’d seen the green grow grey as he,
‘Mid Dundas’ throng, where none could see,
Strode forth in garments patched and thin
And hoarse above the mumbling din
Decried the marks of sheepish sin.
They scoffed and went on walking by;
They heard not the thunder in the clouded sky,
For Relief Line trains were rumbling nigh.
The Lake breathed out an inky squall
Which draped in dusk each crystal wall
And made the rain like Judgement fall.
The creeks and ditches burst their sides;
Commuters trapped without their rides;
A car – a house – lakeward slides!
No reedmarsh lay to sponge the muddy pour;
The rivers dash straight through the Core;
No elmwood grove nor ashen bough stood left to grant succour…
A bleakly stretching marshland; a springing weed-choked weald:
What long-forgotten mysteries – what secrets – do they yield,
These stony husks that strew the sodden field?
How long beneath has it thus lain?
The traveller asks the way in vain
Who seeks the Cities of the Plain.
Snow to Sand: Poetry, Stories and Musings from Canada, the Caribbean and Ukraine 