Two Poems

A friend of a friend from out west

comes calling to the verdant college town

where I live like a bandit king, where I drink

wine made from dumpstered apricots by a stone bridge

over the Speed River (or was it the Eramosa?)

I read Max Stirner, pack on

ill-gotten weight, eating stolen wheels of brie.

I’ve forged a new aristocratic, deadbeat identity

while the southern Ontario summer sprawls

leans into farmland, stretches its arms and yawns.

I have sticky fingers. I smell of rot.

I believe I am happy. I’m probably not.

I never meet him. He leaves

his backpack on my porch, heads downtown

decides to swim the Eramosa

or perhaps the Speed. He’s young and able

and a chance current buries him

like a blade deep in the river.

I walk the gravel paths of the Eramosa

and Speed, calling out

a name I have no face for

was ritual to conjure life.

What rise are Latin names

for diseases that singled out classmates

in the first-world backwater of my childhood. I return to the multi-faith services

for the silent girl from math class

loved fiercely by her few close friends

for the high school principal’s outgoing son—

flagging struggles that brought the town together.

I resurrect the yearly contractions

of extended families, elderly neighbours

who fell into black-hole retirement homes. A friend

lost her father in pre-school. Assuring everyone

how little she thought of him

set the rhythm for her nervous tics. The sick

and old became less themselves in well-mapped increments. Surviving

was within their capacity, until it wasn’t.

All of this followed naturally, in stages

with grief counsellors and pamphlets at every milestone

reading from their scripts made sense of life.

The spell breaks with morning. He is found

downstream a span, tangled in the town’s

flotsam. I see the gurney

they carry him away on, the black sheet

that covers him. What remains, awaits—

his army-green rucksack on the stoop

with its boundary-stone weight.