Canada

I am writing this on a strip of white birch bark

that I cut from a tree with a pen knife.

There is no other way to express adequately

the immensity of the clouds that are passing over the farms

and wooded lakes of Ontario and the endless visibility

that hands you the horizon on a platter.

I am also writing this in a canoe,

a point of balance in the middle of Lake Couchiching,

Resting the birch bark against my knees.

I can feel the sun's hands on my back,

But I am thinking of winter,

Snow piled up in all the provinces

and the solemnity of the long grain ships

That pass the cold months moored at Owen Sound.

O Canada, as the anthem goes

Scene of my boyhood summers,

You are the pack of Sweet Caporals on the table,

You are the dove soft train whistle in the night,

You are the empty chair at the end of the empty dock.

You are the shelves of books in a lakeside cottage:

Gift from the Sea, by Anne Morrow Lindbergh,

A Child's Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson,

Anne of Avonlea by L. M. Montgomery,

So You're Going to Paris! by Clara L. Laughlin,

And Peril Over the Airport, one

of the Vicky Barr flight stewardess series

by Helen Wills whom some will remember

As the author of the Cherry Ames nurse stories.

What has become of the languorous girls

Who would pass the long limp summer evenings reading

Cherry Ames, student nurse, Cherry Ames, senior nurse,

Cherry Ames, chief nurse, and Cherry Ames, flight nurse.

Where are they now, the ones who shared her adventures

as a veterans' nurse, a private duty nurse, visiting nurse,

cruise nurse, night supervisor, mountaineer nurse,

dude ranch nurse (there is little she has not done),

rest home nurse, department store nurse,

boarding school nurse and country doctor's nurse?

O Canada, I have not forgotten you,

And as I kneel in my canoe, beholding this vision

of a bookcase, I pray that I remain in your vast

polar, North American memory.

You are the paddle, the snowshoe, the cabin in the pines

You are Jean de Brebeuf with his martyr's necklace of hatchet heads.

You are the moose in the clearing and moosehead on the wall.

You are the rapids, the propeller, the kerosene lamp.

You are the dust that coats the roadside berries.

But not only that.

You are the two boys with pails walking along the road,

And one of them, the taller one minus the straw hat, is me.

Billy Collins

www.paulreiffer.com