Winter On Amherst Island

The white whales of winter will lie late this year,
and longer in the memories of the islanders,
this nineteen-sixty of the endlessly falling snow,
falling and falling like forever,
and lake and land are one.

On the wild south shore, a soughing solfeggio,
when the wind comes crow’s flight all the way,
from the lost young America,
And the little shacks at Fisherman’s Cove,
snow-taken to their chimneys,
bespeak retreat to Stella.

It occurs to me that Old Bob might have died this year,
a quiet sigh on his cabin bed,
his Reader’s Digest fallen upon his chest,
his lamp burnt out,
his ancient sailed on
to a pickerel-passioned sea.

But the rest, the Harkers, the MacDougalls, the Mulligans,
the Wilsons,
cursing defeat, will have hitched their old dung-thighed
horses,
and hied to their village houses to winter over,
waiting the freeing of the fish,
from icy hatches,
the land’s release from a Half-Nelson hold
of snow.

Winter, that harsh wrecker, shall turn a destructive vise of frost,
against the hand-made nails of all the hollow houses,
where the sons have left the island,
seeking some mainland sirens.

And, frozen-tongued, the spires of the little white churches,
shall rise like stalagmites,
against the blue cave of winter sky,
And lights deepen the dark only in the windows of farms,
On the far reaches of the wind’s rage,
where men stay to keep the stock.

But the village of Stella shall be a warm envelope of life,
voices and footsteps and jinglings,
down the long white aisles of snow;
A winter’s worth of mended nets,
and whittled whistles,
and fiddler’s jigs,
and tales retold,
and under the patch-work quilts of the Stella nights,
seeds for a stonier world.

Strong, still summer-brown, the fingers of the islanders,
clasp like chain-links
about their brother’s need for help;
Harness-mender, wood-gatherer, news-bringer, midwife,
wet-nurse, wedding-dancer, pall-bearer, wake-wailer,
the islanders spin now their cocoon of compassion,
but a lake’s span from the citadel of fierce unloving.

Soon now the island men, crossing the lake for luxuries,
will be ears-cocked for crackings beyond the bells,
tensed for the quick lash to the horses hide,
and the swift jump from a black yawn of water,
and the dash to the island shore,
with their thread and tobacco,
safe in a great-coat pocket,
and in the throat: a long thirst slaked,
in the false-towered Gomorrah of greed.

And I shall not be there this spring on Amherst Island
when the driftwood sea dances a joyous choreography,
and the wild ducks sit saucy in the duck-blinds,
and the blackbirds flower red on the reeds,
and Stella shrinks to summer-size,
and the men go back to the land and the sea.

And I wonder if this spring shall be the one,
to let in the harsh stranger,
wearing his smiling mask of seduction,
smelling of development plans,
come in the name of progress,
to capture
Amherst Island.