tonight someone asked me to describe my childhood. i wish i could have recited this poem, but i told them: fairies, homemade productions, black water, art shows, waterskiing, chicken gumbo and dancing on the kitchen table to tracy chapman and eric clapton.
just thought i would share before we go into the last week of march - my favorite, and most unlucky, month.
Canada
Billy CollinsI 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 hooks 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
Orer 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 Brebeuf 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.
