John Wylam
This is what we look like coming back, I've thought,
or here's the faraway view, echo of a measure
as yet unplayed but somehow inevitable.
We could be almost anyone else, take your pick
of names, there we are at the rail;
this is what we'll look like coming back, I think.
Light mist in the air's another type of static,
we're both hoping for whales, the Northern Lights,
but the season's all wrong.
Ninety minutes to Naniamo, shore to shore;
gulls follow our wake, hoping mass
might draw something toward the surface,
but I haven't seen one bird try even one
claw through white water, never mind grabbing
a fish to remember for its will to fight.
Three days from now we'll take this route
back from Vancouver Island,
the two-lane road cutting through forests
burned white five years ago.
Who knows but we might
vanish altogether and for good,
leave the world to disappear itself (that job's
halfway over already). Even here, the music
pulsing from the PA speakers seems
a bit valedictory and nothing I say
can change that fact. Whenever this subject
crosses the room before us, we tend to think
in terms of coastlines that do not finally
lead back toward America, but due
west toward whatever end we could build
with our brains. Our own private
Montana, we say. This place might well
be our model. Standing at the rail,
we're drinking it down, deciding.
Copyright (c) 2004 by John Wylam