It was mosquito season in the land of plenty
at the cottage by a lake in the Gatineau hills.
And I felt like an intrusion in a Tom Thompson painting.
It was Canada Day. The CBC said so.
And thus, in honour of this, they
would only play the music of this great land.
Oh Canada!
All this made me feel like canoeing;
to see, on her birthday, a Canadian sunset.
I paddled along the lakeshore,
the canoe gliding like a line of lyric poetry
and saw things I could not name;
things green and wet and slimy
and sounds of lapping, slurping and burping,
which made me think about the nature of things.
My wonder and reverie ended at a beaver dam
that stood on guard at the mouth of the marsh
as majestic as any Keep.
I entered the marsh in awe
of the imagination and the ingenuity
that made this lushness and rot.
Water lilies beyond similes
embracing the canoe with her green welcome
and the paddle with her thin entwining smile.
Elegant marsh grass, sharp as razor blades,
danced with the grace of Fred Astaire,
across the shimmering stage.
Trees, long dead, stared down in bleached bone silence
and the laced uprooted roots of the fallen
were the temple gates to another garden.
On these grew cool spongy mosses,
soft enough to be diapers and menstrual pads,
by nature savy natives
And among them grew carnivorous plants
with seducing blood-tinged lips
whose sweet breath no insect could resist.
I watched one struggling to get unstuck,
As dinosaurs might have been in tar pits,
Struggle against fatigue, give up and be still.
I was in shallow waters where navigation is tough
and canoes are good for getting stuck on fallen logs
and paddles for tangling among the lillies
I tugged and shoved with city clumsiness
and disturbed a bittern who beat its wings
in a great show of come and get me.
Her bravado,
her huffing and puffing of her chest to distract me
from its eggs was most primal parental.
I turned and slipped from the marsh
and came across a family of loons, whose
eerie tremolo rippled across the lake.
In a gesture of peace, I pulled in my paddle
and listened to it skip across the mirroring lake
and disappear into a brilliant sunset.
I floated between sun and shore,
from one came reflections, from the other
Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians.
