Ecstasy, Euphrasia

still you stand

on the snow-coated, rye-stubbled hillside

above the farmhouse where your high school

friends are starting the bottle count, the blare

of grunge, the making of pasta from scratch

still you stand alone in the ice-crusted snow

of New Year’s Eve 1990

a Cowboy Junkies song stuck in your head

your body for my soul fair swap

when this sight stalls your senses:

all the hills of Beaver Valley huddle together like sheep

too old and asleep to mind how the slow knife

of seasons shears their backs

where the hills’ noses nudge one another

runs the winter-burnt thicket of the Beaver River

crosshatched by the black leafless branches of alders

that shelter the cold shack of the Grey County gun club

fields quilted by fence posts pin old houses to the old map

of faded flags, weathered walls, wind-bent slant, and

unravelled ribbons of gravel concessions

in those centenarian homes

an apple farmer drowns kittens by the handful

a kitchen fills with back issues

a mother dies in a bed in a yellow bedroom

and yard-stranded trailers await spring’s migrant hands

a far highway bisects the valley in a northward line

to the turbid horizon of Georgian Bay

traversed by a caravan of miniature minivans bound

for downhill powder and broken legs in the Blue Mountains

on the western ridge, a barn roof blazons our owl-kill flag

snow-coated emus stalk the pasture, talking

in their hushed drum tongue

the pine and maple trunks touched with orange paint

point the Bruce Trail to Thomson’s unknown tomb

down the side road, an abandoned house, open as a shirt

across its frostbitten floor spills a mouldy library:

sepia softcore postcards, true crime pulp

a first edition of Earth’s Enigmas

a tiding of crows rides the midwinter thermals

their barks bounce off the drowsing hills

draw your eye to the grey flannel sky

buttoned by a cottonball sun

that whispers you are happy

your breath brakes on the noise of this new signal

as you come down the hill where you still and will

always stand, awake and oblivious

only now do you know what the sun says is true

and only later do you know it is true

this moment wraps you like a Moebius strip ever after

for years crawl blindly around these rye stalks

feeling for the eye you dropped here beside yourself

retrace your tracks, rewrite the scene a dozen ways

as a diptych in acrylics, as a mixtape of lost songs

I’m thinking about mortality

it’s a cheap price we pay for existence

as an arrangement for choir and pipes, as a honeybees’ dance

as one too many tokes over the scorched timeline

as this poem

pour whole days like today into trying to say it

still nothing fixes this spot of time that

always has existed, always will exist

pointing like a compass through choice and chance

through your blood’s blind drift

towards what it wants not knowing what it wants

but is what the sun says true just as a riddle

or does it point to some plan deep and long as a shadow

still to come from history’s blizzard

in this ravenous new century only

hindsight will illuminate like the waste

witnessed by that storm-battered angel

he would like to pause for a moment so fair

maybe what the sun says must stay unsaid

out of time abiding gravid to spawn synaptic

sparks like cloud lightning

across an overcast life, leaking from a street

corner, a radio song, a crow’s flight

from her smile seen underwater

from the chasm ink opens into the page

whenever you write or

merely remember you want to

but the impetus turns to impasse and arrests you

but I hold all this to myself

so for now, then, which is always now

just carry this moment since from now on it carries you:

not a penny to press in your pocket

but a never-healing, poppy-red tattoo