Runaway Dreams (8 page)

If time and life were to take my eyes I could navigate our

home's geography by feel. Braille it. Read it with the tips

of my fingers and the wide flush pasture of my palms and

never knock a knee or jar a toe against any of the small juts

and peninsulas of our living. Lord knows I've practised it

enough. Moonless nights when sleep laid claim to you

I've crept across the creaking boards to sit at the window

overlooking the mercury platter of the lake as coyotes yip

on the ridge behind us and the sudden streak of an owl

flays back the skin of night above our yard. Or the noise

of something moving beyond the walls has called me from

our bed and I've stalked it window to window, skulking like a

thief and felt this space tattoo itself to my skin. I can walk the

length and breadth of this place in darkness and never feel

the lack of light. Geographies become us when we inhabit

them enough. And so I enter every room skin first, the wash

of the smell of our being here borne on currents of air like

motes of dust, settling everywhere at once, leading me back to

you again with every sure and practised placing of the foot.

for Debra on her forty-eighth birthday

indiscernible

this line formed by the great

overturned bowl of the sky

horizon suggested

as the eagle's cry

suggests sound

there's a basso profundo to the crash of surf on rocks

rumbles of strange mariner tales or whale story

carried by current and retold by tide

elegant

passionate as the embrace of starfish to rock

or eerie and enchanted as the anemone's grasp

a siren's call living in gentle, waving cilia

tidal hair

the mermaid's dance in water filled

with singing

there's nothing here to suggest the life

or lives we left behind us

only sound and air and histories spoken

in the sudden spray of heron from a tree

or this rock cupped in your hand

shellfish left behind a symbol for us

not of emptiness or departures or even loss

but of being

it's what we leave behind for those that follow

that counts in the end

that's crustacean wisdom

the mother of pearl shimmer of truth

that lives on our shelves now

alongside the rocks and wood and nets

and floats and curios

adrift to adorn our world

I don't know what it is about this place

that makes such perfect sense

only that geographies sometimes

need our hearts to fill them

as though this delicate joining of spirit to sky

were the underpinning of everything

you fit here

you fill space

as easily as this ragged seam

of coastline fills the eye

rendering distance and forgetting

to timelessness as simple, as pure and perfect

as the line a seagull makes

sailing across the sky

when I think of this continent's edge now

this surrendering to ocean

I will think of myself as coastline

eased, affirmed and recreated

by virtue of you washing over me

the surf of you

filled with stories and bearing news

of other worlds beyond my own

adding to me

this beach of my being

you adorn with treasures

For the longest time I believed

that Dreamwoman would be the one

who cared that the starting infield

for the 1965 Boston Red Sox

was Thomas, Mantilla, Petrocelli and Malzone

or that Bob Mosley was

the bass player for Moby Grape

or that the banjo harkened back

to a gourd strung with strings

from Africa's Gambra River

or that the word carousel comes

from the French word
carrousel

meaning a playful tournament of knights

or that the thirteen central poles

on a tipi each stand for a specific principle

to guide the lives of those who

lived there

I thought Dreamwoman

would care deeply

about all of that

and take it as important

but it turns out instead

that she simply cares

that I do

to the memory of Jack Kakakaway

sometimes he'd just walk away

from the car and head out

across Kananaskis through the trees

and up the slope of a mountain

or along the ragged seam of a creek

where whitefish finned in pools

and the smell of cedar wafted

over everything and I would

follow waiting

for the words to fall

he'd stop now and then

and just look at things

or reach out a hand

to touch moss or stone

and nod and offer up

a half smile or close

his eyes and lift his face

to the frail breeze

and breathe

he put his hand in a bear print once

and knelt there praying

silently

and when he laid tobacco down

beside a mountain spring

I did it too

wordlessly

and he smiled

and I remember how after

one long afternoon of quiet

rambling through the hills

he stood beside the car

and looked back across the land

raised his hands and bowed

his head then looked up

square at me and asked

“did you hear all that?”

and the funny thing is

I did

Fifty years ago now there wasn't nothing like this nowhere.

Me I'm lying in a bed in a room in a brick building they call a

retirement home but me I never had nothin' to retire from.

The bush an' the river an' the land don't ask the Anishinabeg

to punch no time card and there was never no boss man

there when I done things to put no cash in my hand. So me

I figger retirement means to be put away somewhere like

they put me here on accounta my hands don't work so good

no more with the arthritis and me I know I couldn't walk

the bush now even if I wanted to — and I do, my boy. I do.

But they bring me a beer every now and then I keep under

my mattress so the nurse can't see, drink it long and slow,

hold it in my mouth and taste it good. Ever good them beer

sometimes. Make me remember. Like that time me and old

Stan Jack standin' on the dock at the Gun Lake Lodge watchin'

that sun go down, both of us noddin' and not speakin' on

accounta us we see things like that us Ojibway and there's no

words big enough to say. We drunk beer slow there him and

me. One each. Just happy watchin' the land and feelin' all

easy with each other like you come to when you know a man

long time. Him he's gone now old Stan but us we used to

walk together outta Whitedog into the bush an' out onto the

land to places where they never had no names for them on

accounta us we never needed no names. You hold a place in

your memory for what it gives to you. Call it somethin' you

change it and us we never wanted to change nothing out

there. Us we knew our way around by feel like. Where the

wind comes through a gap, how rapids sound, how the voice

of them is diff'rent comin' from the east than from the west,

the cool you feel on your face steppin' into the shadow a

ridge throws all on you. Yes, that land it's a feeling, my boy.

Or least it was one time. But them they come and put in

roads. Pretty soon there's houses. Big cut lines through the

trees. There's diff'rent kind of memories for the people
then.

For me too. Gotta remember which road takes you to which

lake 'steada followin' the trees. Me I went from that dock in

the sunset to the truck the old man got and drivin' to Kenora

that one time in '59 and seein' a girl looking for a ride to

town an' pullin' over and her climbing up into the cab of that

old truck and grinnin' at me with a face like sunshine an' us

talkin' like old friends and when we made the curve at Minaki

how she touched my leg an' we both smiled, me showin'

more gum than Safeway. Stayed in town four days that time.

First time I ever forgot the bush me. First time I ever knew I

could. Funny huh, how fast something like a truck and a girl

an' town can change you? Change everything?

Against the sky the trees poke crooked fingers

upwards in praise

and even the rocks lie lodged like hymns

on the breast of Earth

way hi ya hey way hi

I sing for you

even though my language feels foreign on my tongue

and the idea of myself

scraped raw and aching from years of absence

has only now begun to form itself into a shape I recognize

I watch you wander across the skin of this planet

bearing wounds that seep poison into your blood

your faces drawn into masks like the spirit dancers wear

to chase away the night

way hi ya hey way hi

when I returned to you I never thought of this

a people like me who had to fight

to reclaim themselves

but I've come to like this even more

love you for the pain you bear like saints

the history of your displacement

tattooed upon your faces

in lines and wrinkles etched like songs

in a lower register

sung from the gut

and yet you dance

you walk the Red Road of the spirit

and become more of who you were created to be

despite the incursions and the invasions

of your minds and bodies and souls

it's a struggle perhaps

but I've watched you reclaim yourselves

one ravaged piece at a time, mend and succeed

despite all odds to remain warriors

who dance the sun across the sky

and sing the rain down upon the land

way hi ya hey way hi

there is so much strength in you

and I want to tell you that if you break

do it moving forward not away

risk everything

for the real victory is the journey itself

and the only thing we take away or leave behind

is the story of that trek

to be told and retold forever

on the tongues of those we love

you taught me that

in your lodges and your teachings you showed me

that the world remains a wild place

and our only choice is harmony

way hi ya hey way hi

I can't replace the years they took away from you

salve the bruises and the scars they left upon your skin

heal the seeping wounds you carry after all these years

or return the disappeared ones to your arms

I can't erase that past

but I can learn to dance and I can learn to sing

in the language that has always been my own

I can celebrate in the ceremony and the ritual

they could never take away

become in my own way

the expression of you

before the darkness fell

and after the light returned

as it does now

where warriors dance the sun across the sky

and sing the rain down upon the land

way hi ya hey way hi