He Is Old Now; But He Remembers How It Was

HE IS OLD NOW; BUT 1970/71
HE REMEMBERS HOW IT WAS

By JCSTREET

Young man I fevered for the prairie though
but twice passed, it

spoke to me of the willow-haired girl
met out of Winnipeg
east on the hard
steel CP, her

face carved fine
stone a fragile
blue-veined mask, pale
pure intellect

she was
the prairie sheave, ash
hair tumbling wheat wind the
voice, music;
smashed water, crackling on rock

in sadness

she was a windslough, through
stunt trees
near a Winnipeg wind-barn, the
dying day of winter
tripped on snow-sunk
fenceposts

-----

Against that sheer
dwarf-sweep she was
the bent figure
creeping
when at night my face
burning my westward longing
a pulse
would burst cheekskin like plum

made me weak

-----

This great dish the incest-
ridden prairscape--the click
the crash, the spark of wheel on steel
rail the smoky Red River fires
sifted grain dust
filling hair and skin with that lust; that lust
makes men smash the earth; grind
skin and flesh
into the soil, fill
with river water, bloated on morning's
sere-wind

What Mowat described as
the indescribable
pressure in a man's head when he wrote
of the Barrens, the
fumbling for words, the
loss of understanding, but

Marsha the pale

salt girl was the vessel, clenching
those winds, waters and wild so that
to touch was
to bloat, her

cold knowingness
mirrored the secret--

that

aboriginal moonscape that drove
men in Churchill to run, to
run in circles blubbering, screaming, they
could not understand . . .

that

made men's guts broil into their mouths when they stood
froze speechless by the mile-
wide
rivers of beasts, caribou
running before
a yellow-fly wind

made women

stand
stone-like when they wondered
at frail nub-cabin and nipple-shed, warts only on spare
winter-sculpt frieze

--

That desert lay untapped, cold
fuel for a coke fire, deep
in her dreams, waiting
for a Prince, I

could not ride the wind;

it devoured me like a speck

-30-

written after a train trip from Vancouver to Montreal in 1970

Notes: CP = CPR = Canadian Pacific Railway