The Ancestors
Dreaming before dawn,
I lean into sleep’s breathlessness,
watching the snow fall into the wigwammed dark.
The cold has gripped my jaws;
my black lines die,
turn white on the page,
melt like snow to the touch of hands,
and I am lost like Scott within his tented dream…
Children darting by, the early shouts,
smell of doughnuts cooking in the fat,
and toffee-pulling where the snow is deepest.
A great grandmother who raised seven,
and before her time, people in muslin dresses
and stiff collars, and no smiles.
A Red River farm
with quarters of pork and barrels of flour
in the cellar, and grain man-high
on the fields; and Sarah urged her pony
to pull the carriage faster
over the low swells of the prairie,
remembering the Indian women measuring
her baby’s feet with the braids of their hair;
and returning with small beaded moccasins.
So many histories fading in snow.
Odd little men came out from England.
Some of them became Lords of Manors
in the Cariboo wilds, wearing
riding breeches to hunt the moose, but for dinner
they dressed. No nonsense. Flicking
the mosquitoes out of their moustaches.
And dirty men wandered in from California
poking up the valleys, after gold.
The Chinamen followed them;
the sandbars glistened with their smiles.
Who are these people?
Viscount William Fitzwilliam Milton
crossing the western plains with a classical scholar;
as they crossed the Blackfoot country,
he read Paley’s Evidences of Christianity.
A Mr. Tuttle, brought up in Cheapside,
selling liquor to the Indians and buying land.
The little hard-knuckled Ontario farmers
swinging alone, axelly.
The Scot who was a hard Calvinist,
marrying a Cree woman, and his father
fought for the Covenanters, mind you;
he will survey the West.
Windless the sky drifts,
hills upon hills
drifting, to the barren Rockies,
barefanged, clamping the sky,
feeding from blue hollows
where the rivers drum, baffled;
treed ridges, like lodge-poles, angled
one upon the other in the smokeless dawn,
upon the piled, strewn debris of ages.
A clump of birch. A stream. Forest.
The howls of wolves petering in the mist.
Snow, ruins of humped land, whistling birds
sweeping the strings of the sky.
Lakes looned, alone, like eyes
without puzzle, without yearning.
A moose rubbing his back against a fir
and listening far away.
Who are these aliens?
Roads pushed through, cities sprawling,
gins sipped on croquet lawns,
dances at the Yacht Club,
young men in blazers…
“There was an engineer
who enveloped forty beer…”
and the gushing grain,
and powering the floods,
and cataracts of trains on the raging hills,
and rockets pointing, star-bright,
into another century…
All this, enfolded in a wrinkle of time
on a speck of a speck of the universal dust.
In this blown, slow snow, wondering,
I dream and wonder,
begin and end and begin again,
holding these lines, these lives falling, these little
deaths, feather white, in the dancing night.