Sea Horse
What is a country, after all,
but the shadow of some mythic beast
projected on the roundness
of a sphere — the two-dimensional
skin of a tale told often.
Upon a time, when my days spun long
and legendary, bedtime was an arbitrary mark
on the clock’s train-ticketing face. My bed
lay flat and quiet as a station platform
after the engine leaves. In the twilight
I curled on my side, stared up at my wall,
at the map of the world.
Found my
country. Imagined it a pink horse rearing
from the sea — Hudson’s Bay like a saddle
on its back, rising to the high pommel
of Ungava. Its tail lashed the ocean
with arabesque peninsulas — Avalon,
Cape Race, Cape Sable. Names flung
like fine spray on my face.
What did I feel for it? For this
name I sang in the pink-tongued
morning classroom? OHHH CANaDAH.
The tune boring. The words orotund
as small planets in our mouths.
My map-shadow was big. I liked that.
As though we’d won some competition.
And even though I lived so small
in it. A few streets, a schoolyard,
a ravine with squirrel voices,
sumac leaves.
How could I know its size
was part illusion, a trick
of flattening, a fiction shaped
by the spreading of a sphere.
Still, it was big. I learned a true tale
of its distance, told in the chuff of train wheels
all the way to Winnipeg. I was baggage, travelling
with my Scottish grandmother. She couldn’t
comprehend a trip of thirty-seven hours and cried
all night, so sure we’d missed our stop.
But, for me, legends wakened with the dawn
in mist whispered from lakes. Sumac scrawled
red crayon fingers at the foot of granite cliffs.
Rock rose from water, pink and fabulous
as my sea horse in the new light of the sun.
What is a country after all
but a tale of lakes and leaves,
a myth of schoolrooms,
a certain size and shape
cast on the curvature
of thought.
– From Lattice of the Years