Along The Pleasant River Road

DAVID, MY BROTHER

2010-07-05T09:27:00.012-03:00

That cold February morning when you came / I did not want

you / 'Take him back,' I said / My three-year-old heart

appalled at your bald head / And the fact that you were

not my sister / Instead you crept inside my heart / Still

I continued to send you away / galled because you dogged

my footsteps

Angered that you were ever the baby / Given the warm

and best / The single Sunday afternoon seat in our old Ford

pickup / I left to keep watch on ailing, aging Uncle Bert

My dentist trip denied / because our father promised you

the drive to New Germany / Unattended my tooth grew

sturdy, crooked and ugly

Your grubby little boy hands always

held the biggest half of his heart

On Wednesday mornings / in the Lunenburg County fog

I picked the long row of pickling cucumbers / Sharp spines

pricked my fingertips / You allowed to play / 'He's too young

for such hard work,' they said / My heart bled / All sense of

being loved quickly draining away / and dying

Yet years later / at some undefined moment / your poor

frail body racked and broken / you too lay dying

What was I doing / that moment your heart stopped beating

and I didn't know? / And when I heard / my heart broke too

Shattered into a million wet and glistening pieces

Thin shards that / even now / pierce my body

I hear your voice / See your smile / Meet you on occasion

in a grocery aisle / On the small square of earth / that marks

your grave / I ask Annette to choose two white roses

place them gently in the fading Labour Day light / Crickets

anoint the air with their sweet hymn / I am afraid my fingers

pricked by the rose / might not release the stem / Let you go

8Se09

BROTHER (Born too soon)

2010-07-01T21:06:00.005-03:00

Summer 1958

This morning I open the gift you give me
Wrapped in the thin breath of a Lunenburg County spring

A wreath of mist-scented mayflowers
Fragile skin, palest pink Leaves tough as leather

Grey granite boulders Their rough cries cut
In a dank distant past and delivered
To this hallowed pasture with intense faith
By some fierce and fiery glacier

Keddy Brook sings its bright melody
Thick and brown it skips over stones
Dipping my fingers into its holy well
I sprinkle your invisible bones
In not living, you avoid death
Sweet stranger who now inherits Jacob's land

I christen thee Jacob
Lift you into the hands
Of an all forgiving God

Centuries from now - long after
I am gone - your young spirit
Will splash through this brook
Still dance on this land
Our sacred trust

You bought this for me with your blood

NOTES: Birthed in Elsie's upstairs bedroom
Your only blanket this chilled hush
A solemn murmur of voices
Alone in my room, I listen
Dr. Bennett's feet retreat down the stairs
No one breathes...

2005 Aug 27

Julianna’s Death 1791

2010-05-26T20:14:00.003-03:00

The Boutilier Murders

Morning is silver soft

The ocean weeps
Its thin veil sweeps in
A heavy shroud over
the granite shore boulders
Creeps up the bank
Breaks on balsam fir and birch
Blesses the wild alders

Stifle the ocean's quiet moan
Let nothing breathe

Fingers sift cinders
Night's harsh breath
Charred logs
broken by flame
This strange dance
of sacrificial death
cracked open by one
fierce stroke of
the neighbour's iron pivee

Last night's pyre
yields up its bodies
Cross-piled in the ashes
Anointed by black blood
A girl... The old man...
And at last... underneath
cradling them both
Julianna

Spirit sliced from
her plump German flesh
by one wild blow
thrown in anger by
the Boutiliers' hatchet

Far from her Vaterland birth

Earth
becomes
flesh
becomes
earth

The ocean roars and weeps
Hide... Oh hide your soft secrets

With reverent fear
stiff arthritic fingers
brush back a thick
layer of ash

The ocean cleaves and rolls
Protect... Oh protect these savaged souls

Unseen, the Unknown God
gets up from His throne
In one swift sweep scoops
Julianna's breath
off the ash heap

Cleanses the dust
Transforms it in a flash
to mirth-filled dancing bone

Forgiven... Scrubbed... Reborn
She runs safely home

NOTES: The night had been thick. The sea rolled a great deal.
Two months later, the brothers were hanged at the scene of the murder.

Songs of My Father

2010-05-10T19:34:00.016-03:00

seasons

Grandmother was a big woman
'Did ya see any caribou tracks, Josie?' she'd say
When he come back from the barn

The morning heaving heavy with frost

The snow was maybe three feet thick
And she fixed our throats with molasses
Mixed with a bit of white
Scraped off chicken dung
One of her boys went to Chicago
He got rich there on cattle

Yah, Lavinia was a big woman, alright

Will never did get back

She spoilt me some rotten
Left letters for the witches
At the foot of my bed

Grandfather had a heart attack
As he sat countin' the day's wage
Out of his leather blacksmith's pouch

She took him back to Begger Settlement
Buried him with her people
Up against the cemetery fence
(There'd been a fight about
Ploughed-over graves
Seeded down with grain
In Pleasant River)

No, Will never did get back
And it took eight men
To haul her down through
The wheel ruts and muck
That wet spring she passed on.

*******************
travelling out

That turn in the road back there
Once that was Badger's Corner

Though I never knew why it was

It was some desperate narrow
Then... We watched out for it
In the winter with the sledges

In case you went off

There was ledges on one side
Badger's Corner was some mean
I never knew why they called it that

*****************
living

They was desperate poor
Living back there off the road

And eatin' just mostly
Rabbits and such

Mother kept all 14 of us fed
Fresh bread every day
And big skillets full of hash
A hundred pound bag
Of flour each week

They sure was desperate poor...

Bleeding Hearts

2010-05-04T18:27:00.007-03:00

We have packed hurriedly

The sad news came last night
At the end of a gloriously
Bright late summer's day

'David has gone,' Lorraine says

Our voices break and mingle
With such inadequate tears

For years we have dreaded
This moment now standing
Before us raw and bare

Lock the door ... Pack the car
I look down and notice
I am wearing my red sandals

Remember our first sorrow

I am 11 ... David only 7
Preparing for our infant sister's funeral
I wear red ankle socks - my last clean pair

'Dad, tell her she can't wear red to a funeral!'
Our older brother Mervyn intercedes

Decades older ... No wiser
I close my eyes
Slide down the silent years
On my knees
Mop up the blood with prayer
Listen for your voice

3-9-09

Sacrifice

2007-08-21T20:07:00.011-03:00

Ida Drucella (July 5 – Aug. 8, 1902)

Jacob’s house of dreams was built
for just one thousand dollars

The sharp chip of chisel cuts
a sweet canticle of dreams

Philip (The Carpenter) Fancy’s hammer
wiped with sweat from heady noon heat

He crafts a kitchen with eight doors and –
high in the woodshed – a shoemaker’s bench
for the snipping and shaping of tough leather

A tiny boot laced and buttoned

Intricate lines of tacks
Tapped into its sole
Delicately
Deliberately
Spaced by Jacob’s rough hand

Each tap echoes the sweet refrain
Song of late Saturday summer rain
A symphony of children yet to come
along the Pleasant River Road

Loyalist blood will only be
a whisper in their veins
A seaman’s frosty breath
Salt of Martha’s Vineyard

Carried here carefully by
Ida Newcomb, the new bride
The glow and blow of her
grandfather’s blacksmith brawn
carve her handsome face

Quiet woman on a quiet land

Her morning-still spirit
gently paces an equally
solemn and stubborn grace

Under the dark canopy of
Lunenburg County stars

Under this strong roof

Jacob’s house becomes an altar
A cradle for five children’s deaths

Child Grandchild Great-grandchild

July – in the heavy heat of hayfields –
Ida waits the first one’s going
Her final birth

For a month, the infant
shares the close crib
with Florrie, her stronger twin

Breathes her strength

Blessed by gentle touches
from five sturdy brothers
Archie, Bertie, Maurice, Irv
and little Harry

Until that first frail August morning

Window sash hoisted high
In the room to the right
at the head of the stairs

The curtain hangs limp

The house holds its breath

Ida cradles her gentle daughter
Blesses the last fragile breath
Anoints her with her own name

It will travel with this wee one
on its soon long journey

To the waiting hole
on top of the hill
along the Pleasant River Road

The hush of her morning lullaby
Its sweet cadence denies
the whisperers of death

Birthed from birth

Ida Drucella’s small soul slips
out through the lathes and plaster

Trembling hands cannot hold her.

2007-07-08T20:23:00.001-03:00

Remembering Joseph

2007-07-08T19:40:00.000-03:00

For Joseph William whose journey back
Into the Old World brought us light …

October 29, 2001

If all the years that have ever been could be packed in a suitcase,then the year when this story begins would seem like yesterday. But really it beings like this.

Many years ago . . .

As one of Gramma Gladys' 50 grandchildren, I grew up 'knowing' Joseph. I hope you enjoy reading ... as much as I enjoyed writing about him. Here is a portion of 'Remembering Joseph'...

One day, when Joseph was 21, word came – the way that word
came in those days – written on paper, folded in envelopes,
stuffed into canvas sacks, tossed onto trains
that travel on straight steel tracks

Through thick fir

through tall hemlock

to the foot of Colpton hill where the old house stands.

Opening the sack.
Opening the envelope.
Opening the paper.

The words spill out that will change his world forever.

WAR.

In strange lands across the ocean – an ocean he has never seen –
beyond the bog and the meadow – beyond the fir and the hemlock
and the hazelnuts roasted brown by the sun.

An ocean Joseph has never seen.

And yet, on this first strange night – the night he knows
his world has been broken – Joseph can hear its rumbling.

Its grey roar echoes in his fibre, in his bones.
The growling night sound of the wild grey ocean
that centuries before had washed his forefathers
and foremothers home, searching
on this broad hemlock shore.

This night, its centuries-old roar is calling his name.

Calling him out from his sisters and brothers.
From the old house on top of the Colpton hill.
From the small church – the pleasant river.

Kissing the worried brow of his mother. The sharp
colours of autumn woodland.

War on the ocean.
War in the air.

As he goes, the trees are shedding their brilliant tears
– until only their stark black limbs remain.

Bleak November.

To the roaring grey ocean. It remembers his name.

War on the ocean.
War in the air.

Long thin lines of khaki soldiers.
Drifting away in the November air.
Along the strange Halifax streets

in the mist
in the morning.

Grey hulls of troop ships in the bleakest November.

War on the ocean.
War in the air.

Joseph watches. The land slips away.
Only the ocean. Endless grey ocean.

Silently, stealthily, the land slips away.
Not one soldier breathes. Not one sound.
In the fog, in the mist,
the sharp word unspoken cuts
at the base of his throat
beneath the khaki green-grey.

Only the ocean.
Endless wild ocean.

In the old house on top of Colpton hill, hope lives on.

1942 turns into 1943.
In the old house on the hill,
Joseph’s mother holds him each night
in her heart – and knows
the war will soon be over.

The Christmas tree stood until February that year
– dreaming he would soon be home. And its leaves
turned dry and rusty red.

Winter took off its coat.

In Sicily, war cut its scars into the earth.
And spring spilled sweet almond and wild olives on
the mountaintops. At night, the wind from the ocean
– the wind sang its lullaby with the canvas of the tent.

Joseph lays his head on the Sicilian earth
and smells the sweet scent of mayflowers.

Foot – weary foot – thousands of feet push
across the rivers, over the hot dust of villages
where foreign words break without meaning
across their ears. Mile after mile,
under summer’s scorching sun.

Behind them, peace anoints the hilltops.

Across the ocean, the old house at the top of
Colpton hill gathers summer in her hayfields.
Tall timothy. Thick sweet clover.
Brothers and sisters – William and Gertrude
– Jean and Simeon – Bertha and Ernest
– Norman, Walter and Lillian –
gather it in. Winter feed for the cattle.

Joseph’s mother anoints the stubble grass with her prayers.

Crossing the wild Sicilian waters, on the move again
the long thin line of khaki soldiers moving onward,
moving upward. Through the winding rocks
and treachery of narrow coastal paths written
in the mud of bleak sky November.

Beyond abandoned vineyards, olive groves
broken by the promise of winter.

Inch by treacherous inch.

At night, Joseph listens to the ocean wind
howling its soliloquy and writes:

“The fellows and I have been okay. Tell Mother I am all right and give her my love. The war is almost over. We will be back in England soon.”

On the road to Orotona,
he lays down his life.

Father, we give into your keeping –

Joseph – William – Colp.

In the old white house on top of
Colpton hill, his mother is weeping.

His mother hung his picture on the wall beside her bed.

Through the long nights when the winter wind howled
and wailed around the ice shed, its thin fingers reaching
into the old house’s crannies and crevices

through the long summer nights when the scent of
tall timothy and wild pea and sweet clover
slipped quietly around her bed
Joseph kept his quiet watch.

His gentle eyes tell her that he remembers.

The small clutch of campaign medals catch
the occasional glint of moonbeams. Sometimes
her wakeful ears can almost hear the faintest
whisper from walls that once held his voice.

Years become decades. Still his gentle smile keeps watch.

New young voices slip and skip

around the walls of the old house.

20 – 30 – then 40 grandchildren and more.

Not one needs to ask. They know.
Joseph has always been there.

In the small church by the pleasant river,
his name was etched wreathed by the bright
colours that God had created.

His name was placed among the silver chalice,
the quiet pews and the hushed organ that
stands continually in God’s presence.

And each November, deft fingers work bright poppies
– blood-red poppies – into the moss-green wreath
to place in the silence of the cenotaph.

And the grey sky weeps new tears.

November turns into April.
And April turns into September.

In the old house on Colpton hill, his brothers
and sisters remember. Their hair is grey now.
Time has wrinkled their brow and
their bones have grown weak.

Decade by decade – year after year –
his gentle eyes and quiet smile tell new
generations of nieces and nephews
the sad whispers of war –
and a quiet gratitude
for a price that
has been paid.

The War Department etched his name in gilt and
blue and scarlet red in a Book of Remembrance.

In the quiet government halls
in a cabinet
in a folder
in black ink,
the list of all he owned –

A small coin purse
A New Testament
Photos of his family
A gentle smile.

In the old house on Colpton hill, his gentle
smile still hangs on the wall.

By the Pleasant River, the small church hugs
inside itself quiet words of memory.

Far away across the ocean, in the cemetery
by Moro River, his name is still written
in the hard grey stone.

But Joseph is not here.

He has gone home.

My Father was a Wonderful Teller of Tales

2007-07-08T19:39:00.011-03:00

But when he told me that he had awaken one night to find an angel standing alongside his bed, I knew this was no story.

“It was a big fella,” he said in the soft tongue so common to Nova Scotia’s South Shore. His hands indicated the flow of his angel’s robes. “Your Mother thinks I’m crazy.”

Of course, she didn’t. And he wasn’t. And nothing more was said about Harris’ angel.

He was in his mid-80s at the time. Dispite disabling Parkinsons, he stood well over six feet, a big man himself. Like most of his neighbours who never left Lunenburg County, he had grown from immigrant stock. Sturdy Germans and Swiss – the ones who survived the wild Atlantic crossings of the 1750s to break open Nova Scotia’s wilderness. Germans and Swiss. With a touch of Irish tossed in, of course.

It was that small dram of blood from County Antrim that always accounted for his ability to spin a good yarn, to recall the local lore, and to breathe life into the characters who – in earlier days – had lived in or near his small community along the Pleasant River Road.

It was pouring rain the day that Harris entered the world in the summer of 1915. The First World War itself was an infant and the horrific Halifax Explosion was only a breath away. He lived to cross over into the new millenium. My Gramma, Gladys, had called him ‘Charles’ after his father and at least five generations of Charles before him. But - for the next 80-odd years - he would answer to his second name, Harris.

In Lunenburg County’s early days, farmhouses were built plain and simple. In broad hayfields. On hilltops that had been cleared of deep-rooted tree stumps and back-breaking granite boulders. In this sturdy house built by his grandfather, Joseph the blacksmith, he was the eldest of 14 children. At the age of 10, he quit his desk in the one-room schoolhouse at the foot of the hill to do a man's work with Charlie, his father, driving a team of oxen. Each day Gladys baked a fresh batch of bread and fried huge frying pans full of hashed potatoes. Each week a new one hundred-pound bag of flour was carried over the doorsill. Each year there was another mouth to feed.

My father was born in and loved the Lunenburg County woods. He knew its meadows, knolls and brooks like the back of his hard-working hands. Words like ‘Little Tumblin’, ‘The Clear’ and ‘Sugar Lake’ tripped like magic off his tongue. And he knew its secrets. The mystique of the Caribou Barrens. Malti, son of legendary Jim Charles, who camped at Wash Rock. Young Margaret who died protecting her honour. The Old Ones who heard - and feared witches.

In the summer of 1941, he married his sweetheart. Elsie was a neighbour - a quiet and truthful girl - the eldest daughter of his father's best friend, Arch. It was wartime. And – for the first and only time in his life – Harris left Colpton, his wife, two-year-old son and newborn daughter, to serve as a corporal and cook in the Canadian Army in Aldershot, Debert and - finally - England.

It was a sturdy world. A solid way of life. Arriving home on leave in the middle of a winter sleet storm - no one free to meet the train, he hiked from Bridgewater, 18 miles along the Pleasant River Road, reaching his young family at three o’clock in the morning. In Italy, his younger brother, Joe, was killed by an enemy rifle while on patrol - his body buried in a quick roadside grave. Harris’ body was in England - but his heart remained in Colpton. The brief telegram home reads: “AM FINE. MY THOUGHTS ARE WITH YOU DARLING.” When his troop ship, the Aquitania, arrived at dockside in Halifax Harbour, Elsie and his sisters, Bessie and Jean, were waiting along the Barrington Street parade.

After the war, Harris worked in the backwoods of Nova Scotia cutting line through the blackfly-and-mosquito-thick summers to mark the boundaries of the province's Crown forest. He hunted, fished, trapped, farmed, cut Christmas trees, pit props and pulpwood. Whatever it took to keep shoes on the feet of three ever-growing kids. In later years, he worked as a stevedore on the Halifax waterfront and as a carpenter in Halifax and Bridgewater. Hard work that paid the light bill and put sugar, flour and yeast in Elsie's ever-busy mixing bowl as it turned out an endless abundance of bread and rolls and cakes and pies. In the summer of 2002, Harris and Elise celebrated 61 years of married life. Together they had raised and blessed four children, nine grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. One daughter, Patricia, had died at birth.

As his years increased, age had taken its toll on his strong body. First arthritis, then Parkinson’s Disease – and finally the occasional mini stroke slowed – then eventually stole his steps. Finally, one mid-November morning, his body failed him. Needing two strong people to enable him to move, he endured a month-long hospital wait – fighting to return to Colpton, the home and family he loved. Requiring 24-hour medical care, his heart was broken. He would never go home again.

But not his spirit. His physical being failing him, Harris’ spirit rebelled – his expression of the injustice visited upon his body. On Monday, Dec. 16, still in fury in his few failing moments of strength, Harris developed pneumonia. " I can’t get out of here,” he said. The following morning – one month after his entry into hospital – his body failed him for the final time. Within minutes, he slipped quietly away to be with the Lord and Maker he had served his entire life.

I suspect – at the last – his ‘big fella’ angel returned and showed him Jacob’s Ladder. Angry with the earth that had failed him, Harris did not wait for a second invitation. He went home to spend Christmas in Heaven.

NOTE: Charles Harris Colp was placed at rest on Dec. 20 in the hilltop cemetery he had cared for and tended so carefully throughout his lifetime along the Pleasant River Road. His great-grandson, two-month-old Charles Gabriel ‘Charlie’ Hanscomb was christened with his name on Christmas Eve. New life begins.

THE CHOLERA CHILDREN

2007-07-08T18:57:00.001-03:00

Sept. 2, 1921

Jacob’s house holds its breath

In the closet
at the top of the stairs
death again sweeps
her slow dance

Then – at morning and mid-afternoon –
whisks two small spirits over the open sill
bathes them with a sour kiss
of early September air

Violet’s leaden arms bear the body of
Eldon, her firstborn, close to her heart

She counts each step down
Turns left through the door
Approaches the dining room table

This precious burden
Their last journey of close flesh

Beyond the wall, the kitchen mantle
clock cuts apart each moment
It punctuates the afternoon air

Take her out of here, she says to Florrie,
And close the door

Her young sister-in-law clutches
two-year-old Elsie’s hand
the one who survives

At the top of the stairs
In the little room that bore
her bright laughter, the body
of four-year-old Mildred
waits her mother’s touch

Neighbours – fearing for their own –
will not come near. Arch carves the coffin.
At 27, Violet alone with bitter
heart learns death’s hard lesson.

Two-month-old Ruby stirs in her sleep
Her turn soon to draw life from
Violet’s breast. She begins a journey
into a world that no longer
knows the cholera children.

At the table, the moist cloth in
Violet’s hand anoints the brow
finally blessed by her
goodnight kiss.

NOTE: BRIDGEWATER BULLETIN - The last item in the Hemford News, September 13, 1921: The people of this community are in deep sympathy with Mr. and Mrs.Arch Colp of Colpton on the loss of their two children by Cholera.

DEATH RITUALS

2007-07-08T18:57:00.000-03:00

August 2, 1979

Seated around the kitchen table
with crackers and cold tea cups
sprawled in this strange
and sparse communion

‘He was only 20 feet from shore,’ Harris says
‘We don’t really know what happened’

‘They saw him’ … That from Uncle Sim
‘Looked back just in time
to hear him yell and see
his hand go down’

‘They’re all pretty bad,’
Harris drains the last dregs
from his cup now cold
‘But she’s the worst
Just sits there crying
Won’t eat nor go out’

We were celebrating one cousin's
wedding when we heard the news
Now my mind grapples for this one
only 19, the baby in the family
His face refuses to come back

In this foreign world I sit in a corner
Heavy and weary on my knees
a story and its many strange
faces surface in wild words
Carved by its own ancient rite.

VIOLET'S FUNERAL – Saying Goodbye

2007-07-08T18:56:00.001-03:00

September 1982

The day washes in grey mist
Annette and I begin this strange
walk past pews of foreign faces

The casket has been clamped

Cramped side by side
on the narrow oak seat
tightly we clasp hands

I – will – not – cry

I hope you don’t mind
Ruby says. It was the last
rose from our garden
I picked and put it
in the casket beside her

It lies there now in the dark
quiet and wilted

For 38 years
I drank her strength
A child who snuggled
in the long winter's night
against her soft neck
warm and fragrant

The rest of them are bony, she whispers

White jasmine gently puffs its sweet
breath past the summer curtains

Last night at the funeral parlor
at closing time I touched
her cold cheek

No longer human

Tonight the airplane noses
its way up through the cloud

Dusk becomes glorious

Nose pressed to the window
I search for her footprints.

LOST CHILDREN

2007-07-08T18:55:00.001-03:00

September 1999

Some times pockets of deep grief

hide inside our house.
Tonight my mother, who

never cries, remembers.

In this house – Jacob’s house –

her older brother and sister

die of cholera. The same day.

Sept. 2, 1921.

Eldon is 5 ½.
Mildred Annie just 4.

Fear filled. Neighbours will not come and touch the children.
The dread of carrying cholera home to their own
Ripe in their bones.

Violet, at 27, has to bathe, dress and place
this tender part of her own body in their coffin.

A child just turning 3, Elsie watches once again
through young eyes as her mother carries Eldon,
her firstborn, down the stairs through the narrow
threshold into the sun-drenched dining room.
Placing his small body upon
the table, Violet turns to Florrie:

“Take her out of here and shut the door.”

Eighty-one years later, in her mind’s eye
Elsie see and hears. As clearly as if it is today.
Two days later, on her 3rd birthday, the children are buried.

Carried from the funeral in Jacob’s house out the front door
To the waiting hearse pulled by two small shining black horses.

Perfect matching pair. Not a white hair on their bodies.

Watching Mildred and Eldon’s coffin disappear
around the corner of the house, young Elsie vows

She will go and find them.

At supper that night, Grandmother Ida sits at table
Arch, the children’s father, to her left.
To her right – her own children grown
Florrie, Bert and Irving.

Next to Arch, Violet puts Elsie in the small wooden high chair.

“Poor little thing,” Ida says. “It’s her birthday
And she hasn’t even got a cake.”

“That’s alright,” Violet responds. “She will never remember.”

Elsie does not tell her mother that she knows.
Today she recalls sharply each event

of that long ago September.

Knife-keen moments
chiseled in thin ice.

The next morning when Florrie takes her outdoors,
they visit each corner of the barn. Cow mangers.
The haymow. Horse stall and outbuildings.

Opening every door . . .

Looking for the lost children.

COMING HOME

2007-07-08T18:54:00.001-03:00

October 2002

My heart pulls me away. Yet
every brutally betraying fibre
of my body runs to you
and the path you break open
this dull slumber-filled afternoon.

Through the thick wild spruce
Sharp-needled creeping juniper
Summer swamps. Feet sinking
calf-deep. For so many years you
cleared the way. I step carefully
in your empty footprints.

Slack jaw
stumbling feet
the large body that has failed you.

I watch you leaving me
broken decayed.

Dismayed I close my eyes
and rub your grizzled cheek.

In an instant, you are there.

The rough winter-sweetened wool of your jacket
chafes like sandpaper against my young skin.
Perfume of 6 a.m. air crisp in my lungs.
Returning from the daybreak hunt
the cold slick of your rifle barrel
oiled thin as skin ice.

The shake and rattle of the old wood stove’s
lifter and lid as kindling leaps into flame.

I hear my name.

Opening my eyes
find you walking
tall as the clouds
in the distance
far beyond the woods road.

In the first mist of morning
frost is breathing.

ATONEMENT: Returning to the Land of Myths and Giants

2007-07-08T18:53:00.000-03:00

Sunday, November 28, 2004

It is 8 a.m.

Elsie in her Colpton kitchen struggles
to shape a final wordless goodbye
with her 29-year-old grandson

This morning he begins the back journey

Borne on mammoth wings
his body carries the blood
long-broken

Returns it to the ancient mists
of Ireland’s winter shores

Two centuries before – that blood spilling in
her own cursed vessel – our ancestor
Mary Holloday approached new worlds
Ship-splintering waves crash wild granite
She defies her family’s County Antrim cries

(Your mother is yet alive, he wrote. She calls
to you with the strongest voice of maternal
affection to write if so be she might hear from you
ere she be mingled with the clods of the valley)

This morning the final dust of Mary’s bones
sleeps under stone beneath calm maples
in Lunenburg County’s Chelsea churchyard

Tight-lipped we delay the current moment of truth.

Elsie shivers and snips small tales from
her sharp near-nine-decade-long memory.
In the ‘40s, she says, Harris would bring
the diapers in from the line for me
But he would only do it after dark
so no other man would see him

Her time-troubled bones tremble

Heart still steel-strong she talks of a world
where men were giants borne up by women
who carved Big Feeds from a wild harvest

In the cattle pasture long-abandoned
the silver birches flex their frozen fingers
November has cut them with her bitter bite
Bristling hemlock undergrowth chokes
as it catches the wind’s short breath

Last night it scrubbed itself in the light of a full moon
barely aware a bleak cloak rests a single gasp away

On Saturday Adam and Elsie have journeyed
up the long wind-and-frost-wrapped road
stood watch without words on the cemetery’s crest
at the spot where Harris seven hundred
and seven days before began his last rest

She stands by this young giant
who shares his name
remembers the three-year-old
who clutched her urgently
at the side of a Fredericton road
I’d better take your hand
Grammie, he said, or
a big truck might come
and crush you over

His muscled arm lifts her tenderly over
the heavy wet November sod

Decades before in this same kitchen
the mantle clock – long dead – by some strange
fate struck the hour An aging uncle
brought the word to her mother

The old clock struck 3, he said
Elsie’s young limbs cover in a cold shiver

The following day hands pointed to the hour’s stroke
kidneys failing her father Arch that quiet and
gentle man gasped his last breath
For 60 years he has lain at the cemetery’s top
A stone’s throw from Harris’ land

Alone Elsie gives Adam young giant-become-man
one last fierce hug The sharp throat-caught word
that will not pass her lips she begins her first wake
Atonement offered heavenward as incense poured
with wild grace before the face of an all-forgiving God

Anointed by hope, he strides to rebuild the land of myths
even as his eyes strain to grasp her final touch

A handprint raised in blessing against the window

________________________________________________________

NOTE: Later that same morning, an hour along the road, my eye catches sight
of the giant jet high in the shimmering blue sky – one small bright breath of quicksilver –

CEMETERY HILL

2007-07-08T18:51:00.000-03:00

It is early August evening

We walk – Domini and I –
up this weary tree-anointed road
Voices hide in the gritty chickweed
Cling to the clutch of granite gravestones

Insect legs crackle

Here – hidden in the hum of dust daisies
and wild clover – whisperers are singing
Bend your knee. Touch your ear
to the earth’s rough skin and listen

Domini’s tiny fingers
curl tightly in my hand

Alders – their agony etched in brittle lichen –
begin a gentle evensong They echo the silent
birches that pray daily before the face
of a quiet God. Roots of knee-high bracken
dig deep inside this mysterious inhabited earth

Her feet now aflame
the innocent child shivers
a glorious gold with tiny
licks of fragrant fire

My heavy sandals splinter the dust

Overhead
an east-bound 747
breaks open
the darkening sky

We are each captive in our own world
Tonight – together we cut the invisible
shield and enter this wild kingdom
At the head of the road
At the top of the hill
Bone that has given us bone
We have come home.

________________________

Stand at the crossroads and look
Ask for Ancient Paths
Ask where the good way is and walk in it
And you will find rest for your souls
- Jeremiah 6:16 -