My Plastic Christmas Knight 1 & 2

1.

When I was nine, sick on Santa’s eve,

My mother & father & sister & brother

Came to my room to cheer me & sing carols.

They gave me a plastic molded knight

Mounted on a white horse & armed

With a lance & sword & shield. Two inches high.

I carried him with me out of childhood.

He lost his sword in a fall this morning,

Weaponless he nonetheless stands guard again.

2.

His helmet gone, his lance lost, his sheathed knife

long disappeared and his scabbard empty for years now, he

sits on his white horse - two of his legs gnawed off by

my dog, teeth marks sunk deep into his armour. His Grail

Quest still unfinished, he is propped up in the forest of

a house plant, encircled by a branch like a serpent grasping

its tail in its mouth. He stands, hobbled before a leaf bridge

within that mythic ring, like Lancelot drained of life by

his desire for Guinevere. Light, shafts through the curtains

in the study window & falls like a road on the far end of his bridge.

When next I notice him, one of my cats

has dug him out of the plant & he lies on his side, his horse

on top of him, his head turned to the garden out the window.

Like Merlin I assure my plastic Christmas knight that he can’t

just lie there and wait for the cats to pee on him, To prove

to him that he's not doomed to that fate, I move him to a sill

where a line of shells & stones & other shoreline debris

lie beneath a goblet of towering blue glass.

We came to this land as refugees...

We came to this land as refugees, in the days when territory was bought

from the Mississauga of Burlington Bay and the Grand - a river they called the Ouse:

a nation reduced by war, famine, and disease, a people

nearly lost to Yankee traders with booze.

We came as refugees of the Revolutionary War, came to a colony that was nothing more

than a British military encampment, filled with descendant Europeans, we came with

free Africans as well as fugitives and the enslaved;

we came with remnant First Nations,

allies-in-exile, loyal to covenants with the Crown, friendship chains

binding Turtle Island bloodlines to our common causes:

bloodlines from homelands seized by patriots,

dislocated from still-living loved-ones who stayed behind

on just established reserves, second-class citizens

in the newly created state of New York.

The Captain of the Confederate tribes, Joseph Brant, lost his home in the Mohawk Valley;

and when he found refuge, it was on land given to him on the north side of the mouth

of Burlington Bay, positioned there, by the military commander that governed from Niagara,

so that he and his local native, white and black allies, would defend the Dundas Road to

Fort York; the Governors Road to Brantford at the Grand.

We came to a Protectorate ruled by the marshal laws

of Lieutenants and Governors General, men who operated in the shadows of Magna Carta &

the Protestant Bill of Rights.

Descendant Europeans in the Canadas were, as well, survivors of religious wars,

men and women who indentured themselves to sail to a continent where some

were enslaved upon arrival.

We came as refugees to the just-establishing colony of Upper Canada

carved out of Quebec, which, before that, had been a single province held

since the defeat of the French on the Plains of Abraham: Canadien peasants

decimated during successive Franco-Indian-British wars.

Stranded together, we arrived as friends of those who had been tarred and feathered,

burnt down, and driven off for their allegiances to ancient oaths.

Black, white and red, as would have been said at the time,

found refuge here, grew old together in shell-shocked generations.

Having repulsed the invasion of 1812, Britain took refuge

from the madness of King George, his subjects suffering while the royal house

staggered into the regency of his degenerate heir: leaving colonial dreams tarnishing under

the greed and impolitic uses of power by those raised on localized privilege,

causing the grandchildren of former refugees to rebel in order to attain equalities

granted to their equals in Britain five years before.

The emerging Canadian nation

was subsequently enlarged by escapees of the Irish Famine; 
enlarged by continuous waves of peoples displaced by conflict and disease.

Diaspora's children,

we weave genetic strands into ancient pools of lost causes and survived flights,

valuing good neighbours and kind hosts.

We are bred to the bone of solution;

grow sinews of acceptance, and most of us, stand as one people,

willing to find something funny about whatever comes next.

Our community of remnants, armed with abundant goodwill, is prepared,

whenever refugee waves break on our shores,

whenever push comes to shove;

to comfort

those now grieving those left behind, those

now yearning for those still escaping.

We came to this sheltering land as refugees; and then,

we become the hope of those arriving after us.

Jerry Prager,

Elora November 29 2015

Working on the River

Sun warmed May

The day clear, blue but for trace clouds drifting; the river, beside me, shimmering,

soft breezes quiet. The still surface slips downstream to the spillway;

wet poplar fluff sweeps over. On the far bank

the old mortars of Little Folk's walls

draw me back to the mix in my boat.

The window seat of the Pub shows flowering stands of plants on the bank below: 
purples and greens, gold and straw, serene with the reflection of the iron bridge,

poplar fluff continues to the spillway, to where the water falls in arcs of translucence, sprays of dusk, veils before the shadowed spruce and cedar of the far, darkening bank.

Back to restoring the river wall of the old Magic Mountain,

the water sounds the spill, sluice and fall way, sounds the curvature of the cliffs

before the tooth of time; modulates frequencies of water

ranging from effervescent to boom.

Languid soundscape... disturbed by bridge workers,

by diamond-blade, and generated air.

There are agreements to be kept, promises to be maintained.

Natural rights to defend. Natural flaws to upend.

Work to be finished on the wall of the former Magic Mountain.

July evening

The wind moves the water like a mirage off the rental punt

docked on the village boardwalk, the bow, a fulcrum to fanning surface

rippling reflections of trees, stone walls and concrete embankments.

The Factory ruins are mirrored and moving before their makeover 
by the new lairds of the mill, their takeover unfolding in due season, 
like the slow pool before the sudden rush into arcing waters and explosive spray,
 mists and light and wet before the remaining trees of the future condo world 
get manicured out of existence.

Another Evening in July

The Grand is out the window, I, inside Ashanti writing languorous summer evening,

no trace of the wild river of two springs before, when rains and warm-spell melt
filled the wetlands of the upper tributaries with a gathering gravitas that drained down from the plateau of Osprey headwaters, overflowed the Luther Marsh to Lake Belwood, were delayed by the Shand Dam, raced the flats and ford before Fergus then over its falls downstream to the Bissell spillway and into the slipstream of Elora before hurtling down around the gorge beyond the Tooth of Time.

Run-off creeks had flooded meadows that spring; rains had filled the river outside the window where I still feel the surging spring of two years before, back when a tree trunk busted the concrete of the old spillway, after having first broken the large,

orange buoy chain, strung in front of between the old stone pillars that had once held

the span of the first true bridge in Elora, the span that had become the pedestrian bridge, after which it ceased to be a bridge, though the stone pillars still stand in the river; abutted with a concrete prow to face the upriver onslaught of hurtling trunks and branches, awaiting a new bridge, a re-purposing by villagers or by new money.

Sitting here in the cafe, I can't see where the water dropped beyond the Tooth of Time/Islet Rock into the lower mill pool and pothole below, into the cauldron

of the deepest bowl erupting water through the gorge, whirling torrent around

the karst faults and caverns, replenished out of unseen limestone fissures and tunnels,

a roiling nuanced momentum forced down the bed of the gorge, the tumbled, folded

and exploded run into, out of and around outcrops and stone erosion waves...

the Grand again that spring and the future

of what the new Lairds of Elora have in mind for us... nagging ...

*** *** ***

The building needs more work. The brick is soft above the foundation stone.

The history of the row of stores and shops can be read on its riverside wall,

a portion of which I have just repointed: the oddities of the organic growth of the row;

the gradual coming together as a whole, each distinct building from the front,

has a time line read in the actual sequence of stone work around back.

Idiosyncratic evidence, proof of which walls came first,

are found in the rising cornerstone lines of the buildings with worked corners,

revealing the rest as infill between the nearest corner

and the down river corner of the last building

by the public stairs from the boardwalk to the street.

Down there, the river pools pollution onto the small beach

below the village side of the old pedestrian bridge,

the bridge now gone, the original span across the Grand

for carts and horses, removed years ago.

Bob Robb says the sand of the river bank has a name: Ghetto Beach,

named for the abandoned, termite-eaten apartments in front of the cinema

still known by some as The Ghetto.

Elora's ghetto, Elora's gorge, the divide between those who have and those don't.

On Ghetto Beach, agricultural bloom decays with summer, a view that will be lost under the replaced bridge, no matter who builds it, or its character: the beach legends

will fade, and seasonal blooms vanish below the under-surface of the future span.

October

Money acts upon the landscape of the ancient karst,

begins with hammering limestone as if it were solid rock and not

ancient eroded coral beds bleeding water from the higher lands.

Money scraped away the trees: the death of a minor forest,

a bit player of woods dispatched in the second scene, not to be remembered,

not to be noticed, though voices of protest gather within ionic clouds

around The Tooth of Time, in memories of waters rising, forces growing

against the foundations of private spans and vistas.

Causes mature; autumn seasons a village receding water,

revealing designs of the new Lairds of Islet Rock;

laying them bare before the first snow falls

and the cold cash of consequence freezes the future

like a postcard of Wedding World bling and chi ching;

a wish-you-were-here-in-Fauxlora-with-us kind of thing,

placed in a shoebox and tied with a string.

The Grand River's people, those who populate its banks, those who publish its agendas, those who come and go and yet remain its people, all those who care and can.

will make a stand on The Tooth of Time, like its upriver prow, facing the brunt.

Even still, the river is rain on an ancient reef,

humanity is poplar fluff drifting into the spray of a spillway.

Life always overcomes, death is always reused.

Erosion of Belonging

We can already feel the detachment from place,

the displacement of home, the need to leave because of

a bond that cannot hold, a village that cannot survive the forces

being arrayed against it: the development schemes, the banality

that will soon encroach the natural beauty of the gorges and

their pastoral approaches, the creative community about to be overwhelmed

by the onslaught of exurban commuters and the monied superficialities of tourist traps.

It is never wise to make a last stand on a landscape of sinkholes.

Friendships will survive, though some are already dying on the vine,

others, still to come, are growing: there are regrets and warm memories,

but the going is already in motion, like a iceberg calving,

not yet fallen into the sea, a stately inevitability,

far enough off that we can downsize before packing,

the acceptance and sorrows within the erosion of belonging.

June 2 2015

Elora

The Last 7 Months of My 5th Decade

I have no sense of age, though I have memories of events now history,

I have no lack of youth, no lack of spontaneous passion, desire, attachment, folly.

I am kinder, wiser, gentler, but sometimes just as cruel and unthinking as ever I was.

I can see the different levels of maturity within myself and others, and yet

they do not correspond to calendar years, but to upbringing, hardship,

apology and forgiveness: I still blunder about the world, as weak as ever I was,

I still rage about the world, as torn by tyranny and suffering

as when I fought for student rights in the shadows of the 60s,

when the apathy of the 70s could still be stirred

with reminders of what had nearly been accomplished, what was still possible.

I am no less sensual or sexual or political or emotional, but no more rational, though

I am more spiritual. I still believe there is a well of hope so deep in me

that if I ever found a way to unleash its waters the thirsting world

would know hope forever. My despair I only once discovered was an aquifer

running beneath humanity and into which I would vanish like a drop

if I ever fell in. I want revolution, revelation and the evolution of the species.

Long ago, I chose love instead of wisdom, chose my heart at the expense

of my mind, and left a wake of ruin as I staggered from care to care, passion to passion,

lust to lust, shared suffering to shared suffering, a holy fool of yearning,

in the wilderness of redemption songs, on the outskirts of a justly shattered religion,

dancing before the covenant arc of my life, drunk or sober, stoned or straight,

burning my life in the refining fire of human limitation, an argent dream

consuming the river of human suffering beneath our corrupt societies,

always seeking the distillation of myself into something useful,

a javelin to be flung into the heart of the beast

that ravages humanity,

when all the love and life and yearning is said and done.

The Shifting Sky

The light plays the first tones of dusk on the rooves of the village:

redbrick tints Victorian snow lines between shingle planes of differing stories,

the wordsong prose of sunfall graces the winter hues through spruce boughs,

the pale blue above and beyond is awash with pastel pink haze from streaming heat loss;

and then colour drains from the shingle palette

as the stray clouds collect the last of the ray-wash on the edge of evening;

the boles of maple limbs between houses darkening in the cold.

The life of earlier in the day settles inside, tracing
 longings and wonderments, sketching outlines of memory

into the vagaries of another Epiphany.