I carried you inside me,
frozen river carrier.
But I leave ice to bury
the current it will bury.
I leave pines to stand for me,
fly their ancient flags.
I will let stones be stones,
feel their hold release
their million birds of silence,
their shadows lain in snow.
Tag: Algonquin Park
Weather Report
Now that you are happy
I would have thought the weather here
in Madawaska would’ve changed.
And I wonder if you wonder now
what a waste living can be,
the clouds only landing
to take us up into rain.
But, you know, I almost believe you; perhaps,
it’s just the weather, undecided,
that says otherwise, its backtracking,
its circling, taking one more look
for the thunder we may or may not
have heard.
Campfire
The stick the length of me,
lifted by the beach,
skinned, bleached
by gnaw of weather
and beaver, too,
stripped of younger branches
until the end, an antler now,
almost, as if the body lay just
beyond. Its possible journeys
are what I see now, battles for
the sake of finding one, but landing
on this island anyhow –
which makes it into another thing,
after all, this burning leap
of sudden purpose, like
an antelope perhaps, dancing
for the fire.
Summer Day
If I could take back
every word,
now,
to settle
back between
us,
our
silence,
our highest
branches,
thinly touching.
Like beauty,
no word for ‘us’ —
only the wild guesswork
of wind, the
tips of our tongues
grasping for the
taste of it, already
tasting the end.
Remember that afternoon
we left together,
coming off
Lake Opeongo
the wind busy
scattering
its big islands of white clouds
crossing the
dash like
Thomson’s ‘Summer Day,’
you turning
to peer away,
drawing me in, then,
to the reflection of
you — green and
blue hills
of birch, nearly
transparent,
tamarack,
slender and
teetering.
Ice Out
Light is always years away,
so when it’s here, it’s gone,
like us, when we’re on 60, going 90,
your windowed reflection there
so that I see through your love,
the drink of you spilling from me
and taken by the winter molt of lakes,
like an all-in poker hand, winning you,
swallowing you
whole through the teeth of tamarack,
doing this, not touching,
encrusted in, like your spirit said it would,
in the eye pits of a moose,
taken down by wolves
on the first day we said
we knew it had to be Spring.
Opeongo
Days spent driving north, its roads
ground down to rivers
of gravel
almost flour,
needing
to bare all,
or, at least, tired
of their distance.
The sun rehearsing its,
“where were you last?”
searching, perhaps, for the thing
misplaced,
an undying faith
that once it is pierced,
by the horizon’s arrows of tamaracks,
and disembowels into
the Opeongo,
its beauty will be grasped.
Likewise, they never hear from me, or
I them, but how can any of us
miss
the beautiful inarticulate birds
circling for roadkill
as if the world had always revolved
around something not gone,
just missing?
Frances Lake, Algonquin
Stillness on the Petawawa River
Petawawa River Morning, Algonquin, ON, Canada
Tom Thomson Lake, Algonquin Park, Canada
Isle of Hoy 