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: outdoors
Bonfire
You feed the fire many things.
It takes everything.
Stars back away.
Its heart, bodiless,
embodies the asteroid belt
of your outer ruin.
You cannot say what it is.
Like you, it is almost lion-hearted.
It is mostly human.
Brightest of every most broken,
you see what you feel in your eyes,
ferocious engines of a spaceship.
First Day of Spring
Are you the lake of two rivers
and, melting, is this the river speaking
for the light?
Is highway 60 ok with
your beauty?
What I mean to say is,
is your face breaking apart
across the car’s Tamarack glass,
opening up like
the womb of a moose
taken down by wolves on
the first day of Spring,
already pregnant with sun
and ice and asphalt.
Small Brightness
All you were ever good for was going
on and on,
arriving in between
neither
here nor there,
legs always knowing
the way
to turn stone into the shape
of motion,
to hunt, to close in on,
to step into
the place of distance stationed
the eyes,
and to rest beside
the star-freckled nakedness
of a river, or tamarack,
which talk in their sleep,
guessing you will wake
to start again,
to blink into
the small brightness of a fire
that is always
haunted with hope,
a head, forever,
full of hunger.
Old Growth
I always felt it was in the looking,
though waiting seems better now
that time has narrowed, like the trail
I’ve been following that goes through
the old growth pine of Shish-Kong Lake.
I’ve been here a thousand times,
but the path keeps changing.
The lake below spins faster than ever.
The trees seem to root into blue above,
as if the water could be desperate for sun.
And the birds climb their branches,
leaping southward, though more and more
I notice the ones that stay
as though, for some reason,
the best way to save their lives
is by not returning.
Where the River Takes You
I had hoped the scratches
on my back you left
would remain, like
a grassy floor
a deer leaves,
after a night. But
you showed me
a moth’s wings, instead,
the deer knowing, then,
to stay quiet, within,
to lay in the breeze.
See the wings greying
to mirror the burn
around us, you said. Yes,
though you do not
seem, yet, to sense
the creases of
the old river skin’s
hands, fingerless upon
the brown bear
swimming
towards this mothy shore of trees,
its claws that cannot root
into marks,
or tracks stretching
to the room a deer
wakes into.
Petawawa River Sun
Light Years Away
Light is always years away, so when it’s here,
it’s not, is it? Like you, when we’re on 60, going 90,
your windowed reflection glares back at me,
in that typical disappointed way of yours,
while on the other side of the glass, you’re a shaman dream
overlaying the land, skipping from eons of archipelagos
to lakes, kicking past 2nd century tamarack shins,
and untouched, soaring, like your spirit told me it did,
between the rack of a moose, taken down by wolves
on the first day of spring.
Light Years
Light is always years away,
so when it’s here, it’s not.
Like you.
When we’re driving
120 kilometres an hour
on Highway 60 through
Algonquin Park, your face
in the window’s reflection looks
back at me while outside
it flips across surfaces of lakes
and tamaracks, and, unhurt,
between the horns of a moose.
The Tetons and the Snake River by Ansel Adams
Isle of Hoy 