Cicada Summer

August 1 2011 

Bobcaygeon - The place where water rushes between two rocks.

Osprey turn wide on the wind over the diamond-flecked water. Pigeon lake was created over time by the lock system  that was introduced to the Trent River watershed. The banks bring Byng to mind, willows and turtles sunning themselves on dead fallen trees, wind blown bull rushes and cattails and I hear that the white heron stands stoic and climbs near silence on slow wings.

Bobcaygeon I am told, was Huron land before the Iroquois killed or dispersed or absorbed them. The Canadian Shield stars about 40 clicks north west of here, around Buckhorn where we would go with Sharon and Kevin in the summer.  At last dusk (Memories only mean something after the fact) Eli and I took the old canoe out. She’s a hundred or so years old. Smooth and finely tuned, we paddled it into the reeds at first. There is an inlet just around the corner where the osprey are nesting on a platform 10 feet from the lake. Three of them and their young, quiet as a stonewall with brilliant wings of white and raptor headed. We angled in slowly and sat awhile in the pastel light, brushed across the textured glass of Pigeon Lake. When we pulled the canoe out and set it upside down on wooden blocks one of the ospreys landed in a broken branch of the paper birch and cried his shrill greeting. I’d never seen an osprey.

Southpaw Blues

Rock doves charge the angel-clouds of blue,

darting on dark wings through the storms edge.

A patch of day-sky opened—  they fly into

this singular attic window shaped wedge.

All the maple leaves are silver side showing.

The great heron-blue stratus ambles in

overarching. Our hair raised. Oceans forming

where bone-dry plains once spread under the wind–.

Yesterday I heard that you’d passed away.

The hallowed pill bottle on your bed side table

in a slowly panning shaft of sun displays

a script that did not have your name on the label.

Tomorrow in a circle in the grave-digging rain

the few you could not erase will assemble again.

For Steve M —August 9, 2011.

Car ride  

The misted monteregian hills hunched on the horizon

are in and out of billow-clouds, dark and light by turns.

The knot of overpasses passes under as we drive in

the traffic streaming, sirens, and the absence of the word.

Wheels

Moths and other insects in

erratic elliptics

around the sameness of the

orange glow

over the dime-hoes in lipstick—

they go they go.


We spoke in a circle.