Runaway Dreams (6 page)

VI

Looking out across the lake and seeing

how the mist seems to hold it all together

so that even the loon calls seem connected

to the side of the mountain standing

tall and proud as a chief

or a medicine woman

the forest dropping to the shore

like the fringes of buckskin the stone

of the cliff at the turn of the lake

a shining bead in the flare of the rising sun

it all comes together of its own accord

and all you can do is stand here

and take it in and hold it like a breath

you never want to exhale

these radiant shining moments

that have come to be the foundation

of your time here

when you think of this country now

it becomes as perfect as this vista

this lake and these mountains stunning

in the magnitude of the force of them

resting together on the power of detail

like when you watch your wife cutting

glass for the art she forms with a kiln

seeing how the minute bits of silica

fused together become something more

by virtue of the vision she has

of their wholeness

her story began on a convict ship bound

for the shores of Western Australia

and continued in the buying and the selling

of her great-grandmother on a Fremantle dock

a West Indian black whose face you see

in the line of her face when the light

catches it just so or the direct way

she has of looking at you telling you

with the strength of that level gaze

that the chains that bind her to the past

are forged from love and the knowledge

that her story, her life, is not just what

you see but the sum of its parts

like a lake shining at the foot of a mountain

your story began in a residential school

in northwestern Ontario where your family

was hung upon a cross of doctrine

that said to save the child they must

kill the Indian first — and did almost

except that you were born

in a canvas army tent in a trap-line camp

set beside the crooked water of the Winnipeg River

tucked in a cradleboard on a bed of spruce and cedar

hearing the Old Talk cooed and whispered

by the grandmother who could not save

you in the end from being

scooped away and taken to a white world

where the Indian was scraped away

and the rawness and the woundings

at your belly seeped and bled

their poisons into you for years

both of you adopted

removed

from the shelter of arms

that held you first

the story of you edited

by crude punctuation

and the journeys that you took from there

led you to extraordinary places of dark

and light and all shades in between

the acts of discovery and reclamation

adding to the image you hold now

both of you willing to tell it to each other

so that you know that what makes you stronger

is the coming together of those stories

the union of your lives the harmony that happens

when the weave of things is allowed to blend

all on its own accord

a confluence of energy and spirit

that the Old Ones say occurs without any help from us

the detail of things defined by Creator's purpose

and fused together into wholeness

like a lake shining at the foot of a mountain

so you look across this stretch of Canada

and it's as if you can feel the whole of it

shimmer beneath your feet like the locomotive

thunder of a hundred thousand hooves of buffalo

charging into history

or the skin of a great drum beating

carried in the feet of young men dancing

grasses flat for the gathering of people

come to celebrate the sun

and the wind that blows across the water

becomes the same wind that blew across

the gritty, dusty faces of settler folk freed

from the yoke of Europe the tribe of them

following the creak of wagon wheels

forward into a history shared

by diverse peoples with wondrous stories

told around fires

that kept them sheltered from the night

so maybe this is what it comes to mean

this word, this name, this Kanata

the Huron word for village that has

come to mean “our home”

maybe in the end it's a word for one fire

burning where a circle of people gathers

to hear the stories that define them

VII

Listen. They are with us. They are standing with us even now,

at your shoulder while you gather nets, forge steel, harvest

crops, lay roads, build houses, tend homes, raise children

or stalk moose through a muskeg bog. Can you not feel the

comforting presence of them watching over you? Can you

not feel the weight of an old and wrinkled hand upon your

shoulder or your brow? They are with us whether you believe

in them or not. The Old Ones. The ancestors. Spirit Beings

who have travelled onward, outward into the Spirit World

bearing with them the memories, the recollections and the

love they found here in this world, on this land, hovered over

you, telling you by the gift of intuition that they are here and

always will be. Can you not feel the truth of that? We are the

story of our time here they have come to say, and in the end

it is all we carry forward and all we leave behind. Our story.

Everything we own. Spin a grand tale then. Separately but

together leave the greatest story that you can for those who

come behind you. This is what they say and this is what they

wish. Nothing is truly separate. Every one and every thing

carries within it the spark of Creation and exists on the sacred

breath of that Creation. So that we are all related, we are

family, we are kin. Every story carries within it the seed of a

thousand others and it is only in the coming together that

we discover the truth of that and know that we are home.

At night he'd sit and smoke an old cob pipe

the glow of it in the dark throwing

his face into orange cliffs and dark canyons

of knowing with each drawn breath

like how a September wind can

freeze a man's face in the channel

between Minaki and Gun Lake or how

a cattail root can keep a man alive

when there's nothing else

or how to boil a cedar root

to fashion rope and waterproof the seams

of a tent or a canoe with the residue

sometimes he just talked

and the roll of it would carry me

beyond this world into the places

where stories are born

and a culture sprang from what

a storyteller saw in the shape and form

of a rock, say, or the shadow thrown

by the lean of a tree

it wasn't teaching

not in the strictest sense

he offered his experience

a canvas tent set among the trees

overlooking a cove at One Man Lake

where a fire burned in a pot-bellied stove

and the smell of cedar boughs and spruce

wafted through the aroma

of hard black tea and sweet grass

and the aged ones sat on stump chairs

grinning at you all awkward in the doorway

saying “
peendigaen, peendigaen
”

come in, come in

he'd talk for hours sometimes

and when he was finished

he'd take one last draw on the old cob pipe

and the light would flare like a tribal fire on a distant hill

then I'd hear him thunk it on a log and rise

to shuffle off to his tent

and allow the night to fall

them they didn't know

how much they come to hurt us with that dam

never seen how it could be

they just come and built their concrete wall

and stopped that water, pushed it back into a lake

where Creator never intended no lake to be

and them they never knew it was our blood, our life

was just a river to them, just a thing they could use

and they watched as the land got swallowed up by it

all the trees, all the rocks that marked

the end of one family's trapline from another

and the teachin' stones where our grandfathers painted

visions and prayer songs there

all drowned and covered up from our view

so that a part of us was drowned forever too

but them they never seen that

all them sacred places got washed away

not the big ceremonial places I mean

I mean them places where the hearts of our people

come to live forever

the bend above the rapids where I stretched my nets

when I was young and where I kissed your Gokum

that first time, oh that was a good one that one

so good, my boy, I felt that river inside me then

deep an' cool it was and me I felt like

I was never gonna be thirsty no more on accounta that kiss

and that bend in the river there

that's the kind of places they let sink away

spirit places I mean to say

where our spirits come alive, each of us, all of us

where we learned to live

them they never seen that

all they seen was that dam them

the push of the river against them big wheels inside

bringin' out what they call the hydro

but the word they use for it is power

and them they couldn't see that

that was what they drowned

Out of the alleys rumpled kings emerge

rolling cigarettes cadged from butts one-handed

and hitching up their pants with the other

wheezing, gasping, coughing

spilling onto the street on a morning

grey as campfire smoke — the remnants

of last night or yesterday slung on their lips

in drool or a snarl, shaking like a dog shitting razor blades

for another hit, another fix, a drink, an eye-opener

is how they call it

one by one the assemblage of pain

emerges from the holes and shadows

where they've hunkered in or hunkered down

and the street becomes a loose parade

marching back and forth between

a smoke and the feral early-morning dealers

slinging someone else's product for enough to start the trip

themselves

wheelmen push their carts along behind

the dumpster divers scratching for scraps

you'll eat anything when you're starved enough

you can even nudge the rats aside

if there's enough for both of you

broken women with wild eyes

and skimpy dresses swiped off Army & Navy racks

slink in and ply what remains of their charm and wiles

for a taste, a hit, a drag, a smile even

if it might mean twenty dollars later

when everyone's looped and stranger things

have happened than a furious hump in the alley

between friends and a good ten rock

passersby have learned to walk the line

that exists two feet away from the edge of curb

where you can't be grabbed or sprung upon

or where it takes a good determined lurch to reach you

so that there's an open lane of concrete

between worlds like a land claim where

they've learned to stick to their side of the deal

there's cowboys and Indians, space cadets and hippies

sidewalk commandos and bikers without bikes

and someone's college sweetheart holding hands

with a rancher's son who dreams of horses

out beyond the derricks of Alberta grazing

with only the wind for company and the sun

shone down upon it all resplendent

as memories when they vanish in the wash

of this life, the tide of it beyond

all knowing

he dreams of horses

the roll of them beneath his butt and thighs

and the land swept by in the push and punch

of hooves and snorted breath across

the hard pan prairie and how it feels sometimes

to run them hard as far as they can go

before climbing on a fresh one

and kicking it to a gallop that pulls the foothills

closer

“We need fresh horses,” he mumbles to her

but she can only squeeze his hand and squint

into the near distance

on a morning hard as stone