On a nameless lake
north of Nipigon
I saw a creature

up in the crown
of a burnt-out jack pine
watching me wonder:

should I go on, into the opening
cleared by the fire, or return?
I stayed at the edge,

half in the open,
afraid of a windigo;
I must have turned back

and paddled in,
over spruce bogs,
across Black Sturgeon Lake;

I must have come in,
tell me you saw me
come in.

All the good sports
         go out for a run
                       into the ice storm.

They grimace and squint
           in the headlights of cars
                       on Riverside Drive.

And they run as if for their lives
            in this freezing rain
                        that sheathes and has broken

the leafless branches
            along snow-plowed bike paths;
                          ice-pellets ping off
        
their pricy goggles, their fluorescent shells,
              as they struggle north
                           to the pole where

they always turn back
              for the Christmas lights strung
                       over the porches
              
welcoming home
               those who might have been
                        men.

Weaponized,
a Plymouth Fury
wallows up the off-ramp
oblivious to our toot-toot-*****,
dodging cars to disappear into
the onrush. Senile missiles,

our moms and dads
take aim through their confusion,
behind windshields, selfishly
they hog the right to their wrong-ways
and praying for decorum
cream the Firebirds.

Not because she told me
you and all your work were just a tree-fort
and to get inside one had to trust
the flimsiest of whining rungs
(nailed, nailed, and re-nailed in the trunk),
how the floors were rotten plywood,
a lattice-work of soggy two by fours,
conspiring to keep you in there,
until another backup plan unfolded;
but because you were the only one
to stay up there overnight,
when everybody promised that they’d come.

And there was nothing, really, up there
except you in your tree fort, as if
a life depended on it,
as if life depended on a life depending on it
as it did.

Deadfall

My palm warm on the trunk
of a drowned out jack pine,
I squint into the glare
and feel how the wind rides
the dead crown,
then I push and I push
until the heartwood
that has held up the rot cracks,
until the great crash
into this black swamp
brings forth a shrill
irrevocable silence.

I saw the pigeon rise and dive,
a maintenance man was sweeping
the fledglings from the roof; in silence
(as I was watching from a distance)—death
was a perfectionist; he swept them off,
her little ones, the broken nest,
mixed with debris, all spinning down
behind a row of houses.

She rose and dived again, attacked
the bobbing baseball cap—
Go for the eyes!
but she was simply baffled
by the relentless sweeping;
and then it stopped.

He straightens up,
some other duty calls
the man, and so the bird,
who settles on a barren patch,
flutters a wing and pirouettes,
perhaps perplexed, though I can see
that she will start again.

Back in '71, when I was pregnant with my first child, I went for a long desperate cross-country run through Prussian territory. Waving my arms like a folle, dodging the crottes of maudits corbeaux flustered from the heaps of corpses left over by Napoleon III’s second-last stand, trying to catch the eye of the franc-tireurs, searching for Zündnadelgewehr  in the grenade pits.

In ‘46, just before bringing forth what remains of my second child, I was sitting in a prototype grey Panzer taking *** shots at a couple of charred hibakujumoku (the ******* eternal gingko) when I felt her chewing at my innards. Needlessly and in spite of my best intentions, my strict upbringing and the “Manual”, which I'd almost learnt off by heart, I leapt up off the soiled wicker seat, banged my head on the ****** periscope handle and pulled the red ripcord.

Later, I imagined her breastfeeding on what was described as “the flesh of my withered gland”; I watched her little nails squeezing the calico pythons squirming in my camouflage maternity flack jacket and recited doggerel from the Shorter OED, the classic tales of mirth and fury.

My last, Cenozoic, carried in my matrix through the Sturm und Drang of the Quaternary glaciation, cougar-pelted and covered in flint chips, something like thalidomide finished it off (according to the magnetic resonance). God, how I loved to paint the trichinosis, the rhinitis, no, the rhinocerii (we were pre-literate, after all) on the cave walls. Augustus I called it, buried with blueberries, primitive to any distinctions.

Still, the albino alligators with the orange eyes escaped from the biosphere on the Rhine, the one right beside the nuclear reactor, twenty miles from the cave entrance. They were mutant twins. Reading Herzog's plump lips, they headed straight for the heavily guarded cave door. One paleontologist and one art historian patrolled the opening in alternating twelve-hour shifts. Dressed for duty in typical ice age fashion, long caribou ponchos draped over leopard skin undergarments, they were ready for anything: filmmakers, epistemologists and brutal English; with their laptop PCs, flip phones and clipboards, they were avant-garde obscurantists. They didn't stand a chance, standing there by the door hole, waiting for their cameos.