After the drill of ducking under our desks
and hiding under newspaper, I went outside
and sprawled on the coarse sod
at the edge of the schoolyard,
searching the cobalt blue sky,
waiting for the world to end.

I folded my hands.
Two puffy white clouds formed and drifted away.
A sparrow came and sat on the chain-link swing.
The shadow of a maple grew long and covered me.

And Kennedy hung up the phone;
and Khrushchev threw his shoe;
and I walked home — the long way —

past the cenotaph, past Matkowskie’s Cafe, with the wondrous
pinball machine, past Gus in his grader, grading Centre Street,
who grinned and waved; past the alley by Jane and Barbie’s house,
to Railroad Avenue and the grain elevators, looming like guardians,
past the barber shop and pool hall with its clacking mysteries, then,
turning at the clipped caraganas and Mrs. Swain’s bright begonias,

through the green door at the back of our store,
the Arborite table in the cramped kitchen, already set,
and mom, looking up, a strand of hair falling across her creased
forehead, and dad — folding yesterday’s Yorkton Enterprise,
                                         headline: Deifenbaker Daunted —
looked at me, and demanded, “Where have you been?”
And I said, with unreasoned assurance and composure,
“Making sure there’d be school tomorrow.”

There is no fear in love; indeed, perfect love casts out fear.  – John the Divine

I get up before the wind, I love the calm of morning.
Its tone seems holy. Then, like the dawning of a migraine,
the wind stirs, the light hardens, and old fears rush in.

Today, while having morning coffee, the wind seemed
to enquire, “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?”
and without thinking, I answered,
“I would talk to more people.”

There’s my truth. My fear. Not the terror that flies by night.
Just a tongue-tied fear of being misunderstood, rejected.
A kind of stammering self-consciousness, wary and watching,
alert to hedges and fences.

I heard this phrase once, the arrogance of belonging,
and I thought, how liberating to recline in that space.
Like a superhero, with an innocent, beneficent,
force field of confidence.

Once, in the 70s, friends whose faces I still see, close to me,
sat together under the spell of the Pacific and some kind of love drug,
and though you’ll say that’s synthetic, I saw possibility.

The wind spoke then too, in wave after wave of welcomings,
and I, emptied of anxiety, moved outwardly, on a tide of gratitude.
How we looked to each other, how the gates of our hearts
swung open in wordless belonging.

The wind is still up. From a neighbouring campsite,
a tall, brown, woman, wearing bright blue plaid,
waves and calls out, “Good morning Luv, beautiful morning!”
It’s a voice I seem to know. A voice I’ve heard before.
A voice, perhaps, that’s always been there.

From the wide heart of the Great Plains,
home of bluestem, fescue, and bromegrass,

where in high summer,
a wavy thin haze of heat hangs
over fields of clover, ablaze with purple-red flowers;

where dirt roads, barbwire fences, and power lines,
all meet at the still point of a distant horizon;

where occasional approaches lead to farmhouses —
some are squat and shaggy, from entropy, or tragedy, some
are tall and trimmed and circled by silver bins and good fortune.

An eastern sun flashes off the flanks of the half-ton Ford,
the windshield flashes yellow and green.

The Invasive Plant Guide bounces on the seat beside me;
I’m here for the county, to count and map the trespass of weeds.

I park the truck in a shallow ditch and walk over acres
of grey-wooded hay land, cross quarter-sections of grazed pasture.

In places, ox-eye daisies grow thick as snowfall.
On borderlines, like impressionist sunsets,
glow tansy, barberry, toadflax, and buttercup.

Up a low rise, and past a copse of prickly rose,
on a fence post, standing like an apostle,
a Great Grey owl.

I crouch. Motionless. At length
the owl turns its inscrutable head.
Fixes me. The moment swells, looms, then passes.

The owl lifts itself, slow as mist, opens its grand wings,
belly feathers graze the switchgrass in the ditch
and it floats to a post, as if, in another world.

Leaving me in, or rather, leaving in me,
a kind of rapture, a kind of shiver.
And I knew that most of my life was over,
and I saw, for much of it, I was asleep.

They shall be like trees planted by the rivers of water,
that bring forth fruit in season,
their leaf also shall not wither,
and whatsoever they do shall prosper.
The ungodly are not so: but are like the chaff
which the wind driveth away.  -Psalm 1

Sometimes I imagine myself
a cloud-piercing cedar, or a regal sequoia, or even
a leafed-out, prairie cottonwood, shaped like a wineglass —

one my dad would proudly gaze upon, despite my sticky catkins
dropping on the hood of his Pontiac Parisienne,
despite the missed beer cap under the seat, despite
leaving the windows down overnight, trying to dilute
the smell of stale cigarette smoke,
and on the way to church, the following morning, telling him,
“It was one of my friends, again.”

The pastor reads the verses and I look around at faces,
and what I see is a church full of oaks.
Can’t I be an oak?
Planted in a broad valley, near a bright river?
I try to imagine it,
but end up feeling like a shrub, clinging to late summer.

I look up through the stained glass window and yearn to join
my friends: the dreaming dogwoods ranging over the river hill,
the cool smooth sumac swaying to the Rolling Stones, their leafy hems
swirling, revealing their showy pinkness, the wolf willows
slinking in their silvery thickets, howling like Keith Moon.

The pastor ends his sermon with a warning.
I bend my sinful branches down to take a look.
Yes, my roots are dry.
I turn my leaf-eyes on the patched sod and cracked clay
beyond my straggly canopy,
take in my arid horizon.

“Look, here’s the river!” says the pastor, as though speaking to me.
“Why try to take root outside the licit stream of the Church?”
His words hit my heart like an ash cudgel. He’s earnest.
Truly worried about my tree status.

My parents sit several pews behind.
I feel the eyes of my father on me, like God, really.

I can’t explain it! I want to avoid my chaff outcome,
but I long to be with my friends who aren’t burdened
with church and these eternal choices.

The pastor is praying and I am praying too, saying. “God, just for now,
let me be a shrub, and when I’m older, I promise,
I’ll aspire to be, at minimum,
your trembling aspen.