Walking on Wellington

(Toronto is endured first, then delighted in.)

The streets are dim but the  eastern
face of the CN Tower is glowing yellow.
Black steel towers cast province-long
shadows—a liminal benediction.
I am in a hallowed space untouched by the worries
of east coast fishermen, prairie farmers, west coast loggers.
Here the dress designers are gaining international traction,
the downtown bicycle exchange program is gaining adherents,
the cigarette ends and beer cans are vacuumed up at dawn,
and the CBC sits squat and toad-righteous upon a paved lily pad.
Its logo, a confusion of happy-faces, looks up and down
for news that can be counted on for quick cloning,
because the real future is in the race to carry
news, faster, farther, in higher definition,
without the drag of reflection.

 
She emerges suddenly from the concrete flutes
beneath the glass and tensile-steel mushroom.
Impossibly high, white-winged to my naked eye,
she falls into the grey-blue, then unfolding,
spins above the boom-cranes, a centrifuge, 
her tail a tiller, her wings rudders.
Then gaining lift from the rigging of warm air
she banks and curls away, floats toward
the harbour front where musicians sleep,
and the slow water of Lake Ontario
runs its millennial path,
before microwave and rebar,
beyond the frailty of politics;
to spring my mind free from the cages
around the shrunken trunks of these trees.