For Tom Thomson
By Paul Cameron Brown
I have thrust my fists
up to ice in the
galactic mire of lake,
lured my minnow wriggler
eyes as bait to ensnare
inroads, lake bed wreaths,
across the windchill spine of
brooding heart.
I am on the essence of the North
where latitudes of cold spontaneity
remind me the nameless lakes
part not easily with their secrets.
A man's bones go easily to rot
in the frigid perspiration
called primeval ooze,
precambrian sweat,
the tertiary stage syphilitic crawl
of advancing ice.
All those terms your detractors, analyzers,
devotees coin to define you: the Boreal,
taiga, subarctic steppes, white hell,
recoil under the onslaught, the lustrate message straining
up alkaline clear.
Water is your blood.
A vast hoarding, most of this
planet's fresh drink
is flushed through your
bowels, with kidneys
separating the renic
qualities as snow and
sleet, the night side of
your character.
Tom, son of Thomson fame,
his little canoe immeshed
as scrubbed floorboards now,
a giant winnowing such scattered
firewood over a slow crop of
putrefying muck; perhaps
I see your eyes
as sturdy bubbles
popping from legions
of green liquid
to carouse with your
firm memory.