Love Song on the North SaskatchewanMy ribs are like a york boat, carrying a packed cargo up this river. Trade goods of distant fashioning spread my gunnels: articles of faith, trinkets of desire. Casks of rum of foreign brewing weigh the keel: one currency of self-delusion. I have a sail, but of little use against a northwest wind, so I keep it packed away against the time of leaving. My shivering skin would billow if it could; instead, the fingering wind finds a hole and whistles through. My heart keeps time with the rowing —the clean bright splashing, the greenwood creaking, the drawing of breath and release. You bring to me your fragmented treasures: the furs of marten, fisher, muskrat, ermine, lynx, beaver, wolverine —the diversity of soft warmth astounds me— you bring them to me in barter for my commodities of quick, exotic dreaming. But rum does not mask me, nor do brass kettles divert the steady eye; I am here to draw removable gain and secret profit. While sleeping, my ribs align themselves as palisades, barricading too free a trade, too vulnerable a visitor's position. As they skim the winter's frozen river my ribs like ashwood runners on a sledge accumulate the piles of ice-blocks: I learn to use them to preserve the winter's kill, to prolong my indecision. My ribs become the crossbeams of a coalmine burrowed into the giving riverbank. From these blind sediments I mine the brittle inklings of your memory to light my way and warm me: for I begin to accommodate your ways. I learn to know the turns you take for granted, to feel your mild surprise before my own. Still headstrong, I drill for insight, and when I tap your deepest memories they rush through my high rig of ribs with a raw wealth too sudden to encompass. I must somehow bring a subtle chemistry to their mulling. I stop. I settle. I sink roots. My ribs cluster here like birch trees in a stand of pine and spruce. From near riverbank to far I see blue jays glitter in the aspen leaves and magpies careen through maples. Inland seagulls fold the seams of breezes and all the earthen sparrows complicate the air. |