A Touch Closer

by James Thurgood                   
                            

                    so where she asks

               in this coffee-clutch of poets

           and other strangers is home

                  muscles move with memory:

                                           

                  Atlantic breakers my first salt kiss of life

              red island grimed in bloody knees

        green dreams of pastures

   my four ghostly fathers

         their own dreams cleared

                            their stories fenceposts fallen

                    uprooted stumps their prayers -             

                my grandfather

       shouting sweaty, swearing machines

           through red clouds of whinnying snorting dust

   round a treed hollow

            as to honour the homemade house

       that birthed my grandmother

            whose air of baked bread

                    fed morning’s ravens

             - my uncle yanking

      a familytree of potatoes

                    from sighing earth

             the hardknock city

    I strayed with no lunchbucket

                                  six-pack streets that

                          wormed and layered my brain

           till ages off I sleepwalk their maze

                                                    toward the border

                                                                                     

                                              and prairies

                       that embraced me

       a Saulteaux voice calling

                         our mother died - your mother

                and others I thought had more time

          but gone this way or that –

                               for when you turn

              you can’t even see how far you’ve come

                              in this endless country

                      where it’s so easy to push forward

                                  so hard to go back

                         I just shake my head

                 but that’s not right either

         so open my hand to this table, stool

                         this dark daughter of northern bush

                   fathered by long-gone logging camps

                                                    mothered by city streets

                                     her flesh pierced and leatherclad –

                                                   her civil questions

                                   drawing me a touch closer