Tuesday, July 1, 2025

Canada

[Posted in honor of Canada Day]

I am writing this on a strip of white birch bark
that I cut from a tree with a penknife.
There is no other way to express adequately
the immensity of the clouds that are passing over the farms   
and wooded lakes of Ontario and the endless visibility   
that hands you the horizon on a platter.

I am also writing this in a wooden canoe,
a point of balance in the middle of Lake Couchiching,   
resting the birch bark against my knees.   
I can feel the sun’s hands on my bare back,   
but I am thinking of winter,
snow piled up in all the provinces
and the solemnity of the long grain-ships
that pass the cold months moored at Owen Sound.

O Canada, as the anthem goes,
scene of my boyhood summers,
you are the pack of Sweet Caporals on the table,   
you are the dove-soft train whistle in the night,
you are the empty chair at the end of an empty dock.   
You are the shelves of books in a lakeside cottage:   
Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh,   
A Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson,   
Anne of Avonlea by L. M. Montgomery,
So You’re Going to Paris! by Clara E. Laughlin,
and Peril Over the Airport, one
of the Vicky Barr Flight Stewardess series
by Helen Wills whom some will remember
as the author of the Cherry Ames Nurse stories.
What has become of the languorous girls
who would pass the long limp summer evenings reading
Cherry Ames, Student Nurse, Cherry Ames, Senior Nurse,   
Cherry Ames, Chief Nurse, and Cherry Ames, Flight Nurse?
Where are they now, the ones who shared her adventures   
as a veterans’ nurse, private duty nurse, visiting nurse,   
cruise nurse, night supervisor, mountaineer nurse,   
dude ranch nurse (there is little she has not done),   
rest home nurse, department store nurse,   
boarding school nurse, and country doctor's nurse?

O Canada, I have not forgotten you,
and as I kneel in my canoe, beholding this vision   
of a bookcase, I pray that I remain in your vast,
polar, North American memory.
You are the paddle, the snowshoe, the cabin in the pines.   
You are Jean de Brébeuf with his martyr’s necklace of hatchet heads.
You are the moose in the clearing and the moosehead on the wall.
You are the rapids, the propeller, the kerosene lamp.   
You are the dust that coats the roadside berries.   
But not only that.
You are the two boys with pails walking along that road,   
and one of them, the taller one minus the straw hat, is me.

--Billy Collins

[Photo of visiting my grandfather's birthplace in Almonte, Ontario with my mother in 1992]. 

Sunday, June 29, 2025

Moss-Gathering

 

To loosen with all ten fingers held wide and limber
And lift up a patch, dark-green, the kind for lining cemetery baskets,
Thick and cushiony, like an old-fashioned doormat, 
The crumbling small hollow sticks on the underside mixed with roots, 
And wintergreen berries and leaves still stuck to the top, —
That was moss-gathering. 
But something always went out of me when I dug loose those carpets 
Of green, or plunged to my elbows in the spongy yellowish moss of the marshes:
And afterwards I always felt mean, jogging back over the logging road, 
As if I had broken the natural order of things in that swampland;
Disturbed some rhythm, old and of vast importance,
By pulling off flesh from the living planet;
As if I had committed, against the whole scheme of life, a desecration. 

-- Theodore Roethke

[Photo: moss in my garden].




Friday, June 27, 2025

Traveler, your footprints

 

Traveler, your footprints
are the only road, nothing else.
Traveler, there is no road;
you make your own path as you walk.
As you walk, you make your own road,
and when you look back
you see the path
you will never travel again.
Traveler, there is no road;
only a ship's wake on the sea.

--Antonio Machado 

[Photo taken in Haena, Kauai, 2013]



Canada

[Posted in honor of Canada Day] I am writing this on a strip of white birch bark that I cut from a tree with a penknife. There is no other w...