Canada

Canada

I am writing this on a strip
of white birch bark
that I cut from a tree with a penknife.
There is no other way to express
adequately the immensity of the clouds
that are passing over the farms
and wooded lakes of Ontario
and the endless visibility that
hands you the horizon on a platter.

I am also writing this in a wooden canoe,
a point of balance in the middle
of Lake Couchiching,
resting the birch bark against my knees.
I can feel the sun’s hands
on my bare back,
but I am thinking of winter,
snow piled up in all the provinces
and the solemnity of the long
grain-ships that pass the cold months
moored at Owen Sound.


O Canada, as the anthem goes,
scene of my boyhood summers,
you are the pack of Sweet Caporals
on the table,
you are the dove-soft train whistle
in the night,
you are the empty chair at the end
of an empty dock.
You are the shelves of books
in a lakeside cottage:
Gift from the Sea
by Anne Morrow Lindbergh,
A Child’s Garden of Verses
by Robert Louis Stevenson,
Anne of Avonlea by L. M. Montgomery,
So You’re Going to Paris!
by Clara E. Laughlin,
and Peril Orer the Airport, one of
the Vicky Barr Flight Stewardess series
by Helen Wills whom some will remember
as the author of the
Cherry Ames Nurse stories.
What has become of the languorous girls
who would pass the long limp summer
evenings reading
Cherry Ames, Student Nurse,
Cherry Ames, Senior Nurse,
Cherry Ames, Chief Nurse,
and Cherry Ames, Flight Nurse?
Where are they now,
the ones who shared her adventures
as a veterans’ nurse, private duty nurse,
visiting nurse, cruise nurse,
night supervisor, mountaineer nurse,
dude ranch nurse
(there is little she has not done),
rest home nurse, department store nurse,
boarding school nurse,
and country doctor's nurse?


O Canada, I have not forgotten you,
and as I kneel in my canoe,
beholding this vision
of a bookcase, I pray that I remain
in your vast, polar,
North American memory.
You are the paddle, the snowshoe,
the cabin in the pines.
You are Jean de Brebeuf with his
martyr’s necklace of hatchet heads.
You are the moose in the clearing
and the moosehead on the wall.
You are the rapids, the propeller,
the kerosene lamp.
You are the dust that coats
the roadside berries.
But not only that.
You are the two boys with pails
walking along that road,
and one of them, the taller one
minus the straw hat, is me.


Billy Collins

Posted over on Poetry Foundation