Glacial Erratic
stone
exposed
unsettled
on a hillside
resting heavily
where it has found its home
precariously stable
incongruously composed but
self-evidently necessary
as if the missing piece snapped into place
to finish the puzzled landscape but it waits
for the appointed moment of its removal
when the foreign force of its delivery
with ample warning suddenly returns
making good geological time
destined for someplace still stranger
on a long determined track
taken once and covered
so no one will know
without digging
where it’s from
if not
here
Spawned-Out Salmon
I hope I die like a spawned-out salmon,
which doesn’t die of old age, exactly,
but after travelling untrackable
distances, to the summit of its life,
receives from within itself a summons
to return upstream, uphill, to its source -
and if it isn’t eaten by eagle,
bear, or me, does the thing it always had
to do, and, satisfied it’s done, it stops.
But that’s bullshit about the fish, and then,
what pulls me to wish I’ll feel finished when
I’ve used up the plot I’ve still got to lose?
It’s human and also it’s not to pretend|
I’d give up the means if I had a good end.
On Once Seeing Something Strange
Things tend to resolve themselves
in time from their likenesses
to likelier things but if
you don’t go back the bear half-
spotted in sunset shadows
will be just the bear it was
and the blue electric flash
of parakeet misguided
and miraculous will live
with unfamiliar flockmates
through unfamiliar seasons
somehow
Glint
I’m staring
at a glint
in the road
transfixed I’m
transported
right through it
coming out
to collide
if only
I can think
how to get
directions
to you
On the Emissaries from Queen’s University
Sitting by a beaver pond on a record-warm day
in November, I remember those two apostles,
speaking with authority, enthused with the spirit
of the school that had sent them and the seriousness
of the task entrusted to them. They were our elders
by a year, as we would be to others in our turn.
They’d come to tell us how it is, because they’d been there,
been through it all, so they knew. They said it never snows,
only rains. My cousin, who’d been there another time,
explained the weather’s different from Toronto because
systems run southward along the Ottawa Valley,
supposing storms obeyed gravity, like this river,
dammed up decades to let these little ones swim so high.
The kids will know today’s the day when summer returns.
It comes and goes and comes again, as the kits will learn.
