Eyeshine Part 2

COLD Pa.s.sION

Some dead undid undid their bushy jaws, and bags of blood let out their flies.. .

? Dylan Thomas

The land is barren wears straw wisps as an unkempt man might razor stubble.

The land is dry, a faded yellow in its barrenness.

A sky broods from afar, a stalact.i.te sun accounts merely a jot above that thin road into despair.

Gra.s.s lies everywhere dead, faded tongues above an earth afflicted with scleroderma, deadliest of skin disturbances, forerunner of deeper pestilence.

An erasing wind whips the fields further into bereavement; turns tiny bits of chaff to pursue themselves in a mad St. Vitus dance of cold pa.s.sion.

Starry night. With halos about the moon, pale and languid, big as crimson, far as wind driven flax.

The orange pallor, pale with liquid swoon and ability to churn itself about the night sky or flood in endless beams our poorer spectacle below.

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FOR TOM THOMSON

I have thrust my fists up to ice in the galactic mire of lake, lured my minnow wriggler eyes as bait to ensnare inroads, lake bed wreaths, across the windchill spine of brooding heart.

I am on the essence of the North where lat.i.tudes of cold spontaneity remind me the nameless lakes part not easily with their secrets.

A man's bones go easily to rot in the frigid perspiration called primeval ooze, precambrian sweat, the tertiary stage syphilitic crawl of advancing ice.

All those terms your detractors, a.n.a.lyzers, devotees coin to define you: the Boreal, taiga, subarctic steppes, white h.e.l.l, recoil under the onslaught, the l.u.s.trate message straining up alkaline clear.

Water is your blood.

A vast h.o.a.rding, most of this planet's fresh drink is flushed through your bowels, with kidneys separating the renic qualities as snow and sleet, the night side of your character.

Tom, son of Thomson fame, his little canoe immeshed as scrubbed floorboards now, a giant winnowing such scattered firewood over a slow crop of putrefying muck; perhaps I see your eyes as st.u.r.dy bubbles popping from legions of green liquid to carouse with your firm memory.

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THE WOODSMAN

Barely annoying the woods, his cabin like our woodpile home now for chipmunks and birds, isolated by the lily pads - he eschewed all comfort.

The view barely cognizant, the prospect of the Ma.s.sasauga rattler and an occasional broken tin sharp at the edges was like water's drift audible, not yet seen.

Toying with the cove, past island jetties & blueberry groves inside little giant's tomb; this man became ingratiated with lake treasure, his clearing a triumphant blast.

He affixed his mark - blazoning human habitation on a lonely spot.

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EAST OF OSWEGO

Ticonderoga to Lake George, the cla.s.sic invasion route up the Richelieu valley past Plattsburg, Verdun, a Montreal across the North Sh.o.r.e reroute again

to savour Albany; last of the trading posts east of Oswego before New York protective sanctuary lodgings, free from the scalping knife barrens and the horrors Fenimore Cooper described.

Apple crisp, fall damp the air with an unbroken stretch of forest and Adirondack mountains, there, delicate slip of fair womanhood bliss, she lies, gentle as the finger lakes clothed in autumn crimson.

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PRESENCE OF MIND

Spring heralds the summer with lilacs perched from that door.

In snows, a swarm of bushes lie black and apparently rootless as the town's iron-gate bridge collapses under the centre part of the main road.

Little enclaves of activity pa.s.s as stores, mere centrefolds across busy highway arteries this time of year.

I am a grey fleck in my dark wool coat near the perimeter of a winding fence.

The casual observer gives me half a chance to be seen in the deathless white, opaque coloured moonstone so still against the field's sh.o.r.es.

A plaster river, her sides inserted with isle-dotted chunks, hands across a winter solstice tribal dance.

Ostensibly, I poke the land from stylized limbo, a chalky substance disturbed with every movement's cough.

And if I were to fall, lie down, and cry, the agonized winter's frantic sun would bury me with shadows, give forth dark branches to my freedom.

In the growing dark, I ponder white and infinity.

The hectic pace of the distant highway absorbs less and less my hope.

In private cold, my face burns a tallow white, toes flake in frostbite or erode every sensation.

Stars in the dark canopy above are cryptic mourners and people frigid sorrow.

Black is my colour as I ebb steadily toward their heights.

By morning, when the first wisp of straw or dry leaf catches light near this stringent fence, an occasional pa.s.serby with the presence of mind shall comment how lifeless fields are in the clutch of brittle snow.

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FISHING NETS

The polar stars drip in blood . . .

Orion's mythical crystal white with clarity of forest and low expanse of sky; wooden barques, incandescent, row peals of silver light sowing each slough of wave, spider hues drip upon wetness forlorn with tug and rein.

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