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before the millennium... This is where I came to when my body left its body and my spirit stayed in its spirit home Beside the seething Fundy waters my friend sleeps and wrote his message for me “I’ll wait for you in the west till your sun comes down for its setting” That grand summer in Newfoundland when we feasted on wild raspberries bakeapples Screech and salmon walked four miles in the rain (you blamed me for) to L’Anse aux Meadows where Helge Ingstad and Anne Stine were digging up Leif the Lucky’s ruins talked to them an hour  while I watched the Viking ship and horned heads leaping ashore reflected in Ingstad’s blue eyes On Baffin Island north of summer and summer comes again with every flower  a river where I slept a moment’s hour to dream and plucked white blossoms and sent them searching for you from that island of lost memory are the flowers still searching? Quebec was summer in Montreal Côte-des-Neiges and St. Joseph’s with Brother André’s heart pickled in alcohol where I climbed the steps in winter “the lame and the halt and the blind” climbed in summer in search of Brother André’s miracle and threw away their crutches  On a green island in Ontario I learned about being human built a house and found the woman and we shall be there for ever building a house that is never finished Camped by the South Saskatchewan all day we listened to voices we heard inside ourselves the river like a blue bracelet where the Métis fought their last battle Dumont Letendre and old Ouellette their ghosts came to us in sleep as white mist moved over our bodies the river flowed into the sky In the Alberta prairie badlands camped by the vanished Bearpaw Sea in Dinosaur Provincial Park after the campground closed in fall we wander NO TRESPASSING badlands – the white light suddenly changes to brown sepia twilight we’re 75 million years back in time beasts like bad dreams romp around us with bodies we can see through transparent in the sepia sun and Canada becomes a very old country the Rocky Mountains fold themselves upward giants rising slowly and we are children again Through the Crowsnest mountains at age 17  the freight train a black caterpillar climbing climbing climbing vertebrae chattering up the mountains red coal cinders blackening my face riding the high catwalks riding the empties like bugs like dwarfs like boys pretending they’re men halfway high as the mountains go below us valleys bathed in sunlight glowing enchanted valleys and I came to believe we were beloved there beloved in a land fortunate of itself beneath black cinders on our faces we glowed in turn from the soul’s well-being while I tried to explain myself to myself the simple earth and sky-searching mountains were things I never could explain Flying north and following the Mackenzie River long after the Scots explorer endless forest then endless empty land we seemed to hang between earth and sky then a monster hand with a hundred fingers spreading itself over the river delta and a permafrost town still Canada the Beaufort Sea beyond where the world was blue for ever – comes the millennium into our brief lives I suppose it’s like a kid growing up to see the parts of your own country like a jigsaw that suddenly comes together and turns into a complete picture you’ve touched nearly all the parts you’ve become a certain kind of adult and the ordinary places become endearments that slip into your mind and grow there and you change into what you already are in a country you can wear like an old overcoat Joseph’s coat of many colours  The millennium really makes little difference except as a kind of unsubtle reminder of the puzzle that is yourself and always changing the country that you wandered like a stranger but stranger no longer yourself become undeniable to yourself wearing the lakes and rivers towns and cities a country that no man can comprehend Joseph’s coat turned inside out now indistinguishable from your own innards – a country that no man may comprehend asking the same questions as in ages past time measurable by the tick-tock of millenniums and if by chance we are not alone some traveller on another planet may catch a glimpse of us sometimes looking outward into the night sky Illustration by Peter Yundt
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