ecclectica

Winnipeg

by Laurie Block

Yaroslavl, Odessa, Lvov
Vitebsk Vitebsk Vitebsk
You were at home in that impossible place
until a cold shoulder shrugged you off 
the blond and burning steppes
like crumbs off a carpet, like dust.  


This is old hat, this is why the train stopped
in the middle of a mapmaker's paradise 
where land was cheap and freshly divided 
into meridians and sections and quarters.
A sanctuary of straight lines, a good place 
for the fearful, everything coming at you
in rows, distant but imminent.


It could happen out here,  you could run
the general store or a dairy farm 
into the ground, you could buy a seat
in the synagogue or a tenement in the city.
The toast just might come true,
health and wealth on the prevailing wind.


The great enemy was not wind or cold, or even silence,
but contemplation, thoughts that fell
like stones into the well of winter stillness,
shattering the skin of ice.  All the horizon asked 
of fences and trees and coops, it also asked of you:  
keep to the trail, stand until you fall.


O generations.  O slack-assed ingratitude, your children 
speak the Queen's English but never learned 
the song that sealed your lips,
that tore out your tongue by the roots
like thistle or purple vetch or the tree
in the middle of the road allowance 
where god's golden cathedral was built 
from reverent wheat.
Who in the world do you think you are?
You come to break the land, extracting 
earth's stubborn story like a tooth
gone bad.  Windflower, beard tongue
buffalo grass and seneca, the ancient and ever
green replaced with husbandry and furrows,
fields that lie still as your wife and let you fill them.


Indifference passes for forgiveness.
Far from any shining sea
you discover you can drown 
in just about anything you choose.  Clinging 
to real estate and anger, the old man died 
with 5 grim languages between his teeth.  Your father 
hardly said boo. You, you're a weed,  
you're bent on repentance 
like an old ocean liner
your working on the crossing,
you're turning around slow.