Canadian
In 1845 Sir John Franklin with a crew of 129 officers and
men sailed hom England to map the Northwest passage
and to collect specimens of arctic wildlife. His ships the
Erebus and Terror were last seen in July of that year. In 1856 an expedition commissioned by Lady Jane Franklin found proof of Franklin's death and the loss of his men; an official diary exhumed from a cairn on King William Island also described the surviuors'plan to walk south to the mainland. Evidence shows they pulled a life-boat loaded with food and flammable materials overland for hundreds of miles before the last men died. . .
In blade-silver straits between islands even summer
was stillborn, endangered as the adamant songs
of gulls deserting into fogs above the passage
they did not discover. Twin ships lashed by anchor cords
indivisibly to their extinction. Well-crafted hulls
scuttled, crushed by shards of puzzling ice, sharp white as the
un-
marked fringes of maps, or fine English timbers
bleached and bleaching ivory under the blind-
folded hills. A certain shade of white but not
the white of certainty, that fabric of a virginal century's premise, torn. White of the whale, winter's bones
scrimshawed with piercing weather. The Erebus. The Terror,
the terror, To see that tone stare at the page's edge until snow-
blind as the sailors at their dying, staggering
south into gales, white of blizzard hail cracked shorestones and
this
untouched sheet
of ice, as I fill its pale
(white
whalers peering from the foredeck
of search boats into the freezing)
surface
with terms of unlikely rescue. . .
Sir John Franklin sailed with a
cargo
of proofs
and charts mapping the misty transition
from history to incoherence;
on his maps
a white fiercer than uncomposed parchment
a mutinous pallour, unshrouded cautions
of all colours spread outward like a blot, and hinted
there is no passage here for men
from Devon and Somerset
who have healthy sons and delicate
faithful wives
Whose whole world will become a margin
clenched white around their ships--
John Franklin did not discover his aim
but a whiteness in every sound as patient
and impartial as icebergs
awaiting the blind
century sailing onward, credulous, captained by a sane
faith in progress
that read meaning into every passage
because it was sailing ahead too fast, an evolutionary defect
dust
grinding the littoral under heads
where gravestones of three men face north like sentries
across a frozen sound
with no one left to inform
of anything
a hundred more who scrawled
a linear history
in snow and cairns stuffed with rope and empty tins and polished
bones a cold summer south to Victory
Point
then perished
in duned waves
Britannia never ruled, refuted
by blinding storms
the hoar
face of a spreading earth
hauling behind them a life
boat full of England
able in the end
to lift around them with only voices
a fleeting shanty
of song
Open Season
In the first autumn frost of 1963, my brothers
coasted their punt to stillness in some marsh reeds
at the mouth of the Fraser River, and shot a pair
of rainbows from the sky. The mantle piece of my parents'
home would display those stuffed greens and blues for years;
I'd later steal the glassy eyes to replace my aggies
lost at school. But that cold morning, I wasn't around,
when those quick mallards fell, when my brothers woke
in the same sparse room and spoke together almost
gently of the coming kill. I wasn't born. No myth
but theirs will line this poem, and no deaths either:
they're so young they can't foresee the rift
that time will tear between them. Maybe I know
where they were the night the two most famous shots
of the year brought down an empire's arcing prince,
but they don't know. Last month? Last week? Maybe
they were shooting pool at Dutchie's parlour or drinking
beer in the parking lot outside the rink. Maybe they
had bagged a ring-necked beauty in the pumpkin fields
behind some barn, or hung a spring-net at the cannery.
Hell, maybe they pressed their mouths against our mother's
swollen belly and told me secrets no one else could tell.
They don't remember anything about those days, and if
you can't remember how you loved your brother in the breaking
dawn, why would you care about the famous dead, or the fact
they died at all? My brothers were close as those two birds that flew above the marsh; they're not close now. Myth-making isn't in their blood, or mine, and it's not my business to wonder where they stood the moment that their friendship died. Maybe they whispered something to me. Maybe they said, "Little brother, you'll only know us when we're changed. But we were once another way." Maybe they just laughed and said "he packs a punch."
I don't know. I might as well still be sleeping in the womb
with rainbow bruises on my temples, while my brothers pass
their frozen blue into my nephews' eyes.
Love Poem, My Back to the Fraser
Whale jaw, jack-spring spine, rock cod gill,
scallop under the skin of my hand; these
are the bones I'm burying now. Tomcat skull,
sparrow wing, spaniel paw, full moon behind
my bluest gaze; I'm planting them all.
No animal returns to gnaw its gnawed limb
left in a trap; I've thirty years to dig
the deep six for, and hard shoulderblades
to gunnysack. Darling, carry the spade
for me, chant my years without you down;
I want the sunlight on a new foundation,
my old bricks in the wormsweet ground.
Cattle hock, heron claw, muskrat rib,
mast I hang my breathing from; I'll part
the grass and roll the die; I'll build
new castanets: here's a fresh gentility:
as the hummingbird twines its tiny nest
of spiderweb and moss, so I build
my hope and sleep from the marrow
of your kiss.
