Ode to Ontario
- So that I might praise a man newly weaned
from your bright smog, Ontario, one who burns
with the intensity of five steel mills
and has never given in to sanity or beauty,
but one who was constant in recording the geography
of your faults without drawing conclusions. This feat,
to love originally, requires of the brain
benign bruise spots and of the heart
a willingness to observe teeth-marks in the face of loveHis face - with its parted hair and choir boy
smile above a perfectly-tied tie and with the basset hound
of Niagara falling all over his lap. Androgynous Ontario,
don't weep. You have lost an amorous poet
but everything to be said for British Columbia
is easily said - a lush whirl of fir compared
to your flat belly and the modest mound
of Mount Hope. Remember, he is almost forty
and you have been everything to him - chum,
lover, hag. He could see into your future
and saw himself there, beating you with a cane,
blaming you for your distance. Yes -I have taken him in my arms, folded him within
new species of vegetation and mountains
he will never learn the names of.
He will never know me as he has known you, Ontario:
heading west towards the East, he wants secrets now
and throws himself on the ridge of my body
in vain, in successive waves of consciousness.