Echoes in the Timbers Published

Seven monologues on the 1854 death of a former fugitive slave in Puslinch Ontario.

Howling Algiers

The children of forgotten Lou'sian,

in a warehouse called Haven

black, white and brown, high yellow and Asian,

Choctaw, Creek and Houmas,

salvaged from a derelict time,

refuse of the atomic age, escapees

from the implosion of nuclear families,

abused, berated, shattered and bereft

led out of New Awlins over the snaking Mississippi

by their own daemon genius for flight,

cities draining youth from their catchments.

Some never made it back, some did;

some went down to the water's edge and

what became of them

after that brief shining time when they lived as one,

that long Summer of Love ago,

back when they made their way through broken windows

past unwound clocks and calendars of other days:

dragging tables chairs beds and blankets through the night,

creating a kitchen in candlelight

that no street ever saw; shadows within shadows

within darkness defying despair?

What became of them

hunting dumpsters for food and reusables,

making meals in big pots, always enough for all,

trying not to steal so the law wouldn't care:

theft the only unforgivable crime in America?

Boys almost men sold themselves to uptown Cadillacs

for cum-blown rides in quiet corners, buggered in rooms,

torn out of childhood, shames still buried, shames buried with them:

girls, escaped from ponytails and barbie dolls,

selling themselves, taken in every hole by hard, or lonely men,

returning with food and medicines and sundries: scars

and secrets no one ever learned; a city

that had no idea they were beating time together

in a place they called Haven, Havre, Bìfēnggǎng, Rifugio and Attuko.

That life became Jimmy Little Rat, for whom no crack was too small

the stealth of shadows, the diffidence of cats,

vanished into a sewer and never came back.

Became Linda the Red, and Billy the Knife, who took one another

as husband and wife then rode the junk train in their veins

til they had to be carried away, left

where others would find them, untraceable,

no one but those who carried them caring,

until newsmen dug up their families in Slaughter

set the flames of addiction burning

for treatments that came too late

for Billy Roberts and his Creek wife, Linda Tuskineah.

That life became Pistolero Pete,

the fifteen year old Chicano card shark,

who fancied himself a Riverboat blackleg but upped the wrong ante one hand too many, staggering down Patterson, with a stiletto-opened back,

found cold on the Levee dead eyes open on the River of his dreams,

left by the kids for the cops, the only time he was ever caught,

his discovered corpse becoming their joke in his honour ever after.

The oldest was twenty, the youngest, twelve, Kitty,

tubercular, runaway from Slidell, carried on a board

by the child whores though hurricane debris, coughing black blood,

past roofless, wailing, plaster-eyed nuns

who received her like a sacrament;

until seven years later, a newly frocked priest

gave up his collar for her good graces;

still working the hallucinatory streets,

missionary saints to runaways.

Children of forgotten Lou'sian, scavenge themselves

out of an abandoned wilderness, blow Teliko

on brass fittings and pipes, drum buckets and cans.

strung-wire screwed onto resonators strummed

for joy and ache wailing burnt-out basements,

becoming music the working world never hears,

concrete floors painted with their rage and redemptions,

resounding walls scrawled with their couplets and epitaphs,

their spoken minds chalked on giant beams from ancient forests,

carve themselves into soft brick walls,

Roman reliefs becalming unlit catacombs.

They slept and sleep together in arrays,

twos, threes, fours and many at once

loving, pleasing, despairing, desperate for kindness

from anyone, indifferent to background, to all the codes

they bring like baggage, busted open, remade into one rule:

protect haven and those who live and lived there, always.

Like Ginny Lupo, who everyone claimed was related to a mafia don

and who could talk her way out of anything but a run-in

with a wop-hating cracker from Gretna who beat her so badly

she spent months recovering, while the cracker went on with his business,

until she could speak again, after which, her assailant was found

with a bullet in his brain, hanging on a lamppost on Tolliss

near the Crescent City Bridge, after which

she went home came back with food and blankets and wine

time after time; never forgot her friends and never will.

Like Saint Odile, the daughter of a preacher from Thibodaux,

whose bed was open anytime loneliness broke one of them,

til she got pregnant and carried the child to full term,

gave birth in a heating duct,

and left her son with the Ladies Auxiliary,

the rumour's always told, how she's been a cook,

working an oil platform, shipping out of Beaumont, Texas,

and another rumour always told,

that she keeps leaving children for her daddy,

but no one knows why, though several went asking

and no one has found her, but they'll never stop looking.

Children and teens burned through life; come through years never enough;

the other Summer of Love was for those with flowers in their hair,

they themselves knew only full life bore on Sanctuary Drive

where wharves rot on pilings in the river sheen

of oil tanker rust while brackish wash among dying reeds

recites the coral snake rhyme becoming handy sometimes

“Red and yellow, kill a fellow; red and black, friend of Jack.”

And for those still alive now, the memories never died,

and for those who died then, they're inside those who survived,

and for those whose minds broke or silenced,

they too, are remembered across years,

the living still hoping

to lead them back

in the name of the one

who was hung on a tree,

the one at the heart,

lynched out of hate,

never forgotten,

whose only crime

was doing the best he could

for those who needed him,

lynched for being black,

for loving someone lighter,

someone who

remembers each day since,

including the days

when the walking streets almost took her

til others who loved her

got her home before

she too found a branch

on the same tree

to bear what she could not.

The children of forgotten Lou'sian,

black, white and brown, high yellow and Asian,

Choctaw, Creek and Houmas,

salvaged from a derelict time,

refuse of the atomic age, escapees

from the implosion of nuclear families,

abused, berated, shattered and bereft

led out of New Awlins and across the Mississippi

the way all cities drain youth from their catchments

the way some never make it back, the way some always escape

the way some always end up on the water's edge sinking

because no one knows when it began, or if it can ever end.

In the town where I came of age

1.

In the town where I came of age within the landscape I still know as home,

granite, lakes and pines, I look out on a corner that knows me, though

some of its storefronts are several times removed from those I passed

in snowstorm, sunshine and heat, in the cavalcades of colour

as defined by the autumnal brochures of my youth.

The church hall of my theatrical past, and of the dances of my loneliness,

is there on the hill out the cafe window.

The bridge, over which I sometimes pondered plunging into, in my not

so wonderful life, begat contemplations of how long I would last

in the cold waters of the river's open ice, just down the street, just out of sight.

I am decades away from that almost man, the no longer boy; the broken child

making his inchoate way into a future of heartache he would not have survived

if the crystal snow had foretold his future: his fortune, glimpsed in the narrow waters

of the otherwise frozen river, would have ensured his death then and there.

Blessed are they who cannot see what is to come.

What is bearable in part, could never be borne as a whole.

Like fairy tale breadcrumbs left on a forest floor eaten by birds and rodents;

carried off by insects, and turned sodden with rain to disintegrate before the return,

the way home, has an innocence, a naivetè that makes hope possible,

so that, here in this cafe window, more than forty years on, the miracle of breadcrumbs

keeps marking the trail of my passage with the remaining innocence of my hope,

gladly carrying me beyond the forest, beyond the desert, beyond the salt plain and

the mountains, beyond the swamp, the rivers, the lakes, the pines:

a pilgrim's progress to a faith stripped of pride, prejudice, and jaundiced I;

a faith that consists of the distillations of love out of thin air and thick, the ever willing

ability to trust my heart more than my mind, with just enough vision

of what might be coming, to believe in every new starting again and every continuance,

every grace and insight, every collapsing centre of every expanding care

around every bend in this unforeseen road beyond this corner where I sit,

because outside the door, the last period that will one day punctuate

the conclusion of my long sentence has been known

since well before I arrived here

trailing breadcrumbs.

2.

It is no secret to me, that the boy inside never grew up,

no secret the teenager within, has an unrealistic idea of romance,

and dreams of ever more rarefied manifestations of devotion and service.

The young man I was never stood a chance of maturing in due season,

like this horde of teens and pre-teens in the diner, lining up to pay their bills:

the long haired girls in their riding boots and their perfect complexions,

the red-cheeked boys and their collective posing, too cool as a sum

to allow their insecurities to individualize: they are young and full

of their own fragile immortalities, but if seen as themselves, each alone,

they come apart at the seams into awkward anxieties, desperate to conform,

to fit in, and yet stand out.

They are the peers of my youth two generations later, like the ones

who thought me so much braver, so much more willing to go out on a limb,

as if I was not a damaged child making up constructive rebellions, not making it

up as I went. Despite what they thought, it wasn't confidence that made me other,

it was the secrets inside me, and no doubt, among these adolescents lining up

to pay for their lunches, there are a few a least partially like me, though the rest

are happily aging into the roles assigned them, with the provisos in their own minds,

that they will do it better, and so they should, but mostly won't, for all generations

are born to replace those that gave rise to them, unless now, in the coming age

of a rapidly changing climate, they alter the future in ways beyond all generations

that preceded them.

Some of these paying up and leaving this eatery, will die along the way,

have their names and dates etched into yearbooks; into the hearts and minds of their peers,

some lost, accidentally forgotten by best friends some drunken night, a night

of random choice remembered by the survivors forever, a choice that alters everything.

Others will perish in all the other sundry ways in which youth fails to become age,

because good fortune fails, because sickness or random occurrence or suicide

removes them from the stage.

It is humanity's lot to come and go, individually, and as a species.

There is only care and consideration, or their absence, to mark our passage,

the broken and the unbroken alike, we all end in the grave, or the ash urn or spread

on the winds, or lost at sea, or vanished into who knows where, though we each measure

our lives in love, or in its absence.

So let the young be naive, and the old be wise, let those whose innocence is taken

and those who retain some of the same all of their lives, remember:

we are creators and destroyers, we manufacture hope and despair, we grow families and friends

or fail to. So if you find yourselves, or your sons and your daughters, or those of others,

on the routine cusp of eternity, patiently - or impatiently - lined up to pay for their time here,

consider them with kindness, for we all carry a secret we don't always admit, to ourselves or others.

3.

In a place I lived only through high school and slightly beyond,

but where my family still lives, a place to which I have returned to

over the decades for holidays and visits, I study faces for evidence

of those I once knew, most of the names are gone, and familiarity

does not place many faces, however much some seem like ones

I once knew.

Humanity only has so many variations of features with which to work,

and so at best I recognize possible and probable former friends and acquaintances,

without knowing almost anyone, just those vaguely reminding me

of people I may have known, mistaken identities and assumptions,

the partial memories of a jumbled puzzle.

There are too many decades, there is too much absence, too little prequel to my original arrival

followed by comings and goings, too many elsewheres, too many possibilities that faces

could be known from some other place altogether, and that they too are visitors, tourists

in a tourist town with long or short associations to the place.

My family would know, my mother, my brother, my sister: they are my continuity,

the custodians of my old who's who.

I am, of course, sometimes remembered, since my face and hair and body shape

are all unchanged, and thus, to those who are from here; who once knew me,

I am a face in context. They know my name, though more often than not, I don't know theirs,

unless I once knew them well. Most names for me, are echoes of memories, resonance

without substance: re-introduction, at best, provides only memories for the next time we meet,

some have stories with anecdotal triggers, deep reverberations

that cause an eruption of recollection, either from personal connections, or from shared circumstances:

of the we were in it together variety, either events from my student council presidency,

or from the two neighbourhoods in which I lived, or the swimming hole,

or hockey and soccer teams, because there was a life here, some of which even I

remember better than others.

The landscape, the streetscape, the landmarks of my first arrival here

alter more slowly than the people, except when they don't. Buildings are demolished,

new ones built, even the granite shield is now subject to dynamiting developers,

so that, where once there were forests on rock outcroppings, ubiquitous malls

rubber stamped by town planners across the province like bacteria spreading their wastes

on agar agar plates, now decimate the character of localized places I knew,

eradicating idiosyncrasies of less formulaic ages.

The landscape, the streetscape, the landmarks also age like people, they grow old and die,

albeit more slowly, they deteriorate, collapse and disappear altogether, while nature stakes

it's own inexorable claims on every demense.

Humanity is mist on a lake turning to clouds, and one way or another

we are a species on the verge of oblivion or evolution, we are a process, not a stasis,

so that, here, in this place where I came of age among people

I rarely recognize anymore, the temporal shifts

reveal transformations as unfoldings, not into flatlines,

but into still other folds within the folds;

what is hidden for a time, can be seen in a heartbeat between breaths;

revealed and concealed as wavelengths of life's momentum.

Jan 8-10 2016 Huntsville/Elora

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