The Canadian Writer Speaks

She spoke with a defiant tone

against atrocities in the East,

at length on her studies in Asian history,

professed her pledge to bring them peace.

She told us of her adopted home

on a Mediterranean island of women,

one woman in particular, a pariah

to the community of her birth, ridiculed

for celebrating the love she was born to.

Through the reading I sat

next to Colin who’d arrived in Winnipeg

to a broken heart and a city full of strangers.

Colin, with his tye-dyed shirt

and shaggy hair whose biggest fear

was being noticed, who tittered

when she spoke and fell victim

to her evil eye.

She invited questions so we asked

about the East, sharing global wisdom

about the people she’d met, exotic places,

distant lands. Her talk on foreign tongues

was accented by a soft hiss in the audience

intended to silence an old man translating

the writer’s words to his aged companion.

When I asked of her island home

she seemed reluctant to answer,

as if I might show up some day,

wet and dirty on her doorstep

asking to be let in, and so,

I asked instead of Canada ,

how if felt for her returning

to this land so free and we

don’t even know it .

What might she have to say

we haven’t heard before?

Nothing. I’m too young she says

to understand my country -

and I have a plane to catch .

Norm

for Bobby

You might say his time in this city is historical,

if you’re one to believe, like the ancients, that history’s

a precedent for a good story. Not that Uncle Norm

is ancient, it’s just that he was here before me,

when the elms were saplings and the limestone blocks

of Laura Secord still rang with the echoes of mason’s hammers,

when the community centre was a House of God.

Uncle Norm belongs to a different time, a Canadian Golden Age,

for which we’ve grown all warm and fuzzy, as if public lament

is the compromised price for the dissolution of one’s past, young men

gumming tales of backyard hockey rinks and learning to skate,

our wobbly blades partnered with kitchen stools and wooden chairs.

The limestone blocks have settled. The fear’s been raised.

They want to tear the old school down and the Church out back’s

a Community Centre, the word of God upgraded to provincial policy.

The Wolseley Elm’s battle against disease has been arrested by

a plaque. But for all this, some things never change.

Some things never change, and each fall, before the first snow flies,

the boards of the outdoor rinks appear and right themselves

into awkward ovals, ceilingless cages lovingly constructed to trap moonlight.

Some day they’ll raise a roof and walls around the rink and hire a Zambonie

to groom the perfect ice. But not today.

This evening on my way to work I saw him, in his snow suit,

rubber boots sliding on the new ice, hosing down the rink.

Not Uncle Norm, Norm left Winnipeg nearly forty years ago.

A stranger, another father with a son at home, taking advantage

of a few quiet moments to tend a section of frozen field.

Not Uncle Norm, but it could have been. He taught his sons to skate

on these same rinks, as I did mine, and it’s with him the precedent begins.

His rising in the mornings before work and walking, garden hose in hand,

to the church at the end of the street, where he’d hook himself to the outside tap,

then grip his hose like some livened serpent as it spat forth a litany of ice

and pucks and hockey sticks, encasing the northern dawn in our own brand

of holy water.

Thaw

In transit, again. Soaring

thirty thousand feet above

the Saskatchewan prairie

where field upon field

of cultivated soil slowly

loosens itself from the cold

hold of winter.

Refusing to count the days

until she leaves, knowing

well the time will come

as readily as all things do.

The season turns, and life

returns to the sleeping earth,

but she and I, we share only

the sadness of parting,

a decade of memories

dammed by confusion,

once roiling waters

now stilled,

blooming

a profusion of hurt

a blistering of guilt.

Again, in transit,

thirty thousand feet

above the dun, emergent prairie.

Far below and passing,

the waking earth

gives up its first tears

to the incessant burning

of the season’s thaw.

My Prairie Home

It was over the phone that he

finally let out what must’ve

been brewing for I don’t know

how long. Why don’t you just...

and I prepared myself for any

number of potential expletives,

maybe a good anglo-saxon

compound. Why don’t you just

he said...why don’t you just go

back home ! Never! I never!

Never had I thought I’d be told

to leave the place I had come

to call home. He himself was

the child of immigrants. A first

generation Canadian exploring

his new-country roots, his pride

in the sacrifices his parents

made to establish themselves

in the desolate dusty prairies

of the early twentieth century.

We’d talked of this many times.

The amazing breadth of this country.

My propensity to wander the edges

of the nation’s boundaries and his

inclination to settle close to home.

Why don’t you just go home .

He spit those words out. They were

his decree, delivered with contempt.

Home. Where is my home? I am

currently here, in Winnipeg . For

ten years now. I call this home.

Not to press my point but, I

inform him that my grandmother’s

uncle built a home on Grosvenor,

and that she had come to visit, to

convalesce, in the 1940s. She even

made the society pages. The uncle

had come to the city when it first

boomed in the ‘20s and built himself

a successful real estate business.

On the other side of the family, Norm

and Irene had lived for several years in

Wolesley. Had raised a couple of sons.

There’s a bit of flatlander running

in my veins.

At this he grows a little silent, though

no less determined. He’d simply lost

a bit of steam when forced to mull

awhile on some facts. But, like a train

leaving Saskatoon with a belly full

of prairie grain bound for the elevators

in Thunder Bay , I heard him building

from a long way off. And I dug in,

‘cause this is my home. Now. I’ve

acquired a fondness for the arching

elms of Wolesley, the boarded up

decrepit buildings on Main Street .

The slick pretensions of Corydon’s

Little Italy . The Carberry Sandhills.

Pothole lakes in Nopiming Provincial

Park. The town of Churchill . The city

of Dauphin. The Brokenhead River

and Manigotagan. Big sky evenings

adrift in my canoe on the La Salle

watching fledgling Great Horned owls

tentatively venture from theirs nest;

listening to White Tails - Jumpers -

snort as I drift by, surprise them

grazing on the underbrush; snapping

turtles plop from the gumbo bank

back into the muddy depths of the river;

wild turkeys chortling and one time,

a kit fox with a damaged hind leg,

calling spiritedly for its mother.

Why don’t you just go home . This

too is my home. Regardless of where

I come from this is where I find myself.

Where else should I go? Before I have

a chance to ask, before I shake clear

of my reverie he’s back up to speed.

He let’s me know that I should go

back to the place I come from, leave

this city to the likes of him, this

is his place, where he belongs and I,

I should go back to where I come from

back to the place where I belong,

drag my sorry ass back, all the way back

to Ontario .