The Valley

I see my father walking
in dusty boots from the mill
through piles of golden lumber
row on row in the butter light
of evening below the church,
and the air is cool and
tinged with words that flow
as fish in summer currents
and seep to the dark embrace
of the earth beneath his feet.
Love is patient love is kind
unto the hills amazing grace
for now and ever more amen.
I breathe the scent
of strawberries in a field
and salt on red rut roads
and hear hymns that flit
on swallow wings
to waiting nests against
the weathered barn.
This is where I learned
that truth is fluid and
sings along the hydro wires
from pole to silent pole
and winters with the geese
and lovely butterflies
and never wears a ring
or agrees to glint on
anything but bottles cast
by pilgrims into ditches
on their way to Santiago.
And my father was a pilgrim
in this village where he
wandered through his days
and he never knew a morning
that was old or came to
evening with an empty bowl.

© 2010

Before we knew
what we know today
and spoke so freely of it,
there were kitchens
with wood stoves
where the air lay still
on pale afternoons
and men like my uncle
sat in old chairs
that creaked with time
and smoked pipes
that were packed
in a certain way with
tobaccos no longer
made or remembered.
And it was winter,
or one of those
settled seasons,
when new eyes
beheld old ceremonies
of murmured small talk,
beneath clocks imbued
with permanent patience,
- and light crept
in collaborative shafts
across the dwindling of the day.
I remember matches
flaring in the silence,
flames like honey
to the leaf, and vapours
sifting in supine dreams,
- and men who were wise
and unadorned
and did not fear quiet
or the hour they might die.

© 2010

On Christmas Eve
my father got his axe
and we walked out the road
to the woods where we
searched along the brook
for not one but two
evergreen trees
and cut them down and
carried them home.
Thus the ritual began.
The first, always
a little rough
and less pleasing,
was presented first,
my father propping it up
by the window
in the living room
for my mother and
sisters to inspect.
Invariably
they circled it
like birds from the sky
until one by one
the flaws began to appear
- a thin spot here,
a poor limb there,
too spindly on the top -
and a concensus was
swiftly reached that
this tree would not do,
whereupon my father with
a certain practiced sadness,
carried it back outside
and waited just a little
before returning
with the second.
It never failed.
Invariably it was
deemed a big
improvement on the first
and granted wide approval,
some years
judged so highly that it
was still being praised
on New Year’s Day
when the lights were taken down
and the tinsel was put away
and we pitched it out
with the first one
on the snow behind the barn.

© 2007

The American hunters
came from Boston when
the skies were gray and
the leaves were gone
from the maples,
jolly men in red hats
and plaid shirts who
drove “new cahs,”
smoked Camel cigarettes
and threw strange
bottles into the ditches.
They shot deer with rifles
that rang from the hills and
reverberated over the corn fields.
We stood in our tracks
and counted the blasts
until the last trace
of the last echo
died in the darkened spruces.
We never saw, we only heard.
Then followed the ceremony
of rum and ropes at the camps,
and the strapping of carcasses
to the hoods of
Buicks and Fairlanes
for the pilgrimage
home to New England.
We counted the points
on the antlers
when they stopped for gas
at the corner store,
praising the bucks
and praising the does,
sharing the happy laughter.
The fur was rough, close up,
no longer sleek.
We stared at eyes that
that stared back at us,
and the blood already hard
on the shining fenders.

© 2009

We could spot the
Jehovah’s Witnesses when
they turned the corner
at the Otterbrook Road
and stopped at the end
of the laneway to let
the children out as decoys.
They always knocked
at the wrong door
and my father would usually
send them packing before
they got the Watchtower out.
There were no fundamentalists
in those days except
Billy Graham on television
and even he was suspect,
asking for money
from Minneapolis.
There was only the
United Church then;
even the Baptists seemed
extinct, remembered only by
the cemetery beyond the hall
where the grass was
rarely mowed.
There were no Jews
of course and
hardly any Catholics
though it was understood
that Ray, who lived with us,
and worked at the mill, was
a good man, if divorced,
and unable to marry Hilda,
the nurse he went to see on
Saturday nights in Truro,
all eyes watching as
he donned a dark felt hat and
drove his great blue mercury
out the laneway and
down the gravel road.

© 2007

The day Tom Fulton
cut off his thumb off
at the trimmer saw
I knew the mill was
a dangerous place.
I saw the look on
my mother’s face when
she heard the news,
and for days the tale
was told of fishing the
stub from the sawdust
and taking it with him
to the hospital - for all
the good it did.
Tom soon returned
to the dinner table but
the bandages bulged for
weeks on his hand
and the stump stayed
red and angry as long
as I lived at home and
sat in the chair beside him,
and there were other tales
from other mills like the one
in Queens County where
a sawyer caught his shovel
on a flywheel and
the handle drove
the teeth through
the back of his head.
My father was a sawyer
and I thought of that,
waiting for the whistle
at closing time as he
removed his leather apron
black with balsam
and shovelled the
sawdust from the place
he stood all day behind
the whirling saw.

© 2008

I saw no prejudice
when I was growing up.
There was no one
in the village to be
prejudiced against,
unless it was
unonists,
and thankfully
none of those ever
showed at the mill.
Yet well into the sixties,
after James Meredith
went to Ole Miss,
after Rosa Parks
was jailed and 
Hattie Carroll died,
after Bull Connor loosed
the dogs and hoses,
and Martin Luther King
raised up his dream
in Washington,
after all these things,
Halifax still had
an Africville and
The Island remained
a part of Truro,
and they still sold
Nigger Balls
three for a penny
at the Co-op store.
No one gave it
a second thought.
We bought them, ate them,
grinned our licorice grins
and went back for more.

© 2009

Before the internet
and colour television,
before Nixon and
Vietnam, even before
the moon landing and
the day Kennedy was shot,
I walked through the snow
to the Pattersons’ farm,
taking the shortcut
across the orchard
by the darkened barns.
And there in
the kerosene light
we played cards on
Friday nights in the fifties.
And it was oh so long ago
when families still ate
deer meat and gas was
thirty cents a gallon,
before the flag debate and
red headlines in the Herald.
There was no hurry there
with Velda laughing,
and Lonnie asleep upstairs,
Hughie with his tobacco tin
and Billy making mischief
with the jokers.
We ate hard candy
and drank dark tea,
and the world could
still stand still then,
when the mill was
done for the day
and the sun was down
and a fire burned
in the kitchen stove and
the only sound was
that old house
cracking in the cold
and Don Messer and
his Islanders playing
over a battery radio
from Charlottetown.

© 2009

He scooped tacks
from a bin behind
the counter and 
popped them in bunches
into his mouth,
retrieving them
one by one to nail
in rhythmic sequence
into the soles of
upturned shoes
on an iron last.
His hammmer sang
across the morning and
into the afternoon
as clocks ticked
upon all his walls and
neighbours came
and neighbours went,
and children stopped
on the way from school
to see the tacks
upon his tongue,
and hear the chimes
and cuckoo birds
and watch as he lit
his corn cob pipe and blew
graceful rings of smoke
half white, half blue,
through sunbeans
bright as bars of gold
that slanted through
his window.

© 2008

We yanked trout
from the waters
of Gleason Lake,
sleek creatures that
flung themselves at
our hooks and died
beneath the spruces
on Saturday
mornings in May,
heads forced back
between thumb
and forefinger
until their white
necks broke beneath
the pressure and
the eyes went slack
and we slid
the shining bodies
onto alder slings
and carried them
three miles home.

© 2007