Kuhëmëna Dances Upon Wabishkiigo Gchi-Gami:Silver Path VisionBy D.A. Lockhart
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Against contemplative
night sky, Buccaneer sign sears open the air, bathes an empty patio below. Prince coated in flood lights, smoke from a single cigarette drifts upward into darkness of open sky beyond. I walk beneath a wide open sky in this lakeside resort town that has fallen all so quickly into off-season. This night carries the familiar lassitude that autumn brings. Port Stanley shuffling along with Grandmother approaching Broken Tree Moon. In patches between buildings there is enough green left to believe that well-formed Forest City girls will wander down Williams Street at any moment. Because the measure of any vacation destination, no matter its proximity to home, is the way that pretty things lift our spirits beyond our age, beyond every way that we come to believe our lives must be. Well-formed feminine youth and unending summer sunshine swell cooling autumn dream apparitions. Alone, in this lake port town of docked boats and hold-over road workers, I come to understand that this is the country I was born to. I slip into Barnacles at the midpoint of land risen above the beaches below. Worn barkeep, flips between playoff baseball and American college football replays. Distinct in each fiction, want of the unfamiliar in each diffident gaze. I share a bar top, daily special plates, and small talk about the way the Knights man-handled the Sting. We all wear the rank of our clans through the stories we agree upon, the manner we see ourselves reflected in the way words can rebuild lives lived. We let advice flow about the way that governments spend money, how reconstructing a failing bridge is an inherent political act, and that politics boils down to how bureaucrats find ways to pay for the things that the people want but have yet to learn about. Mid-meal we pause to take in the final moments of a Spartans victory, the dismayed looks of east coast college students and boosters as their maize and blue myths of supremacy meet the hardened edge of state college needs to prove that work must overcome inheritance. Each of us relishes a moment that strength, power, and accomplishment finds its way into the hands of those not born to privilege. Into night absent of coming chills, single car past ROAD CLOSED sign, idles at the Mac’s. To the bridge, across the convenience store lot to the gravel line separating ongoing construction and the tamed world we inhabit. I’ve heard that a few blocks inland from this sign, a great asaawens rests beneath the two-storey buildings and cliffs reaching well into the sky. A fish of enormity that once powered a settler camp large enough to build a tourist town and a bridge to it that would require repairs a few generations later. An enormity not visible from this now-empty lot. One streetlight above burns its mark into the wide-open night at the edge of the great lake. I walk past a mostly shuttered factory along the harbour front. This night is welcoming in its desolation, fearful in what the darkness could unlock, yet always hopeful where one finds light. Barnacles darkened beneath yellowed light. Street devoid of even parked cars. Night measured in distant melodies, wind through drying leaves Not a soul between the half-built bridge and the lower part of Williams Street. Each step welcomed in gentle downward slope of land that changes from grass and asphalt to sand and asphalt. Cabins pushed to the edges of sidewalks declare their availability for lease, exhibit a desperation in their degrees of disrepair. Still a low sad Prince song trickles into the air above the patio of the Buccaneer and beyond the great lightless expanse of Wabishkiigo Gchi-Gami unfurls. A lake named for the people that had, too, sunk their roots deep into the clay of Three-Fires territory. People chased, silenced, then ignored by the inheritors. And as the sidewalk and town give way to the totality of sand, Grandmother Moon in near-full body is reflected in the lake below. Out of that reflection arises a pathway, merges two worlds, and hear in the waves the drums of the deer people. Gifts that we must find equal measures of kindness that we have received. Rise, Kuhëmëna, rise above this ever-flowing lake, let waves bring light ashore, let waves bring, medicine song let water light find warm sand and rock to pool. Shoegazer Gospels: Mosaic Sun VisionBy D.A. Lockhart
Water snake exhaust
vapour dangles out from blue, yellow cab. Inside, through steam crusted windows, night claws hungry at the warmth of taillights. Play, oh sweet brother, into this our weak heat night. Let loose that shoegazer dance of an opening riff and howl into the construction-paper-thin plate glass and brick onionskin walls of this lounge in the shadow footprint of its grand theatre neighbour. Sing to us of the warm caresses we dream still follow our shadow-saturated love in these tin-rickety chairs, forever black reflective tabletops. See this tea light reflected in the O-ring of pint glass perspiration. Let us remain seated and attentive enough so as to hear the moves that we will and must make to not carry to our beds the empty cold of late January. Let sing the emotions of the cold nights, let it ride upon the melody of guitar, the reverb of voice, the words buried in a Jesus and Mary Chain chorus. Haunting blue back light of bar fridges casts three women into bar-side sirens, each rendered aphonic in the drone of guitar. Returned to this eclectic lounge year after year as if honest youthful then working-class migrations ended in the same tabletops of low-cost draft beers. This suburb on the straits a production line of promised factory work and a dearth of robust paychecks, a thickness of unfulfilled childhood daydreams and here in this our low-light cavern of commiseration, we return time and again to the sanctity of familiar rhythms and guitar-heavy refrains. I have come to this temple again. I have come to hear the songs of our shared seasonal night, I have come to bathe in their medicine melodies. I have come to find warmth and light in the cold of these, our darkest portions between moons. Here, even in backlit darkness it is clear that relations run deeper than blood and that shared time in shared places nurtures the manner in which we survive. Backroom tables are stand-ins for living rooms that everyone knows are only for sickbeds and post last call infomercial watching. Front of house means a corner view of University Ave bathed in the cool blue of the city at night and the bands that play before it. It is here that I sit, embrace what this city offers those venturing close to its heart. Raised plywood scuffed chipped black, elevates a four-piece cloaked purple in basement lights. They chop between notes sparsely covering the octave. shiver in goose pimple light. Our permanent sun rests beneath our feet. In enduring high gloss tile, salt-infused too-weathered grout, the mosaic reflects the paucity of light it receives, jettisons every particle as if the room itself is the arc of energy beyond the collective event horizon. Here, we are static lost in the reverb and wall of guitar, murmur of voice, the trickle of fire as the next swig of Waterloo Dark goes down hard and true. Imagine yourself alone in the world between songs, the sketches of time not carried long enough to explain how those three women at the bar are the second best thing this night. Lingering in the cold, partial heat of a bar in the wrath of the city’s annual polar vortex, time itself crawls in its pace as it too seems to search out the lost heat and the missing light. Tall girl taps three times onto bar top. Others shuffle to balance, meet floor with outstretched tentative toes. Pixie cut blonde, cuts into you with certain eyes. Arise as every heat joule must in this dark season. Rise and face into the depths of empty crisp air between. And they do. The second best thing about this night, they rise up before the last song and all but one looks at the band for one good moment and they slip into the night behind the half-wall and show posters. Temples, even ones of winter salt-tipped suns, are best given to the solitude of thought, the vision of the world afforded by the coldness of draft beer, the darkness of light, and the resplendent cacophony of a Catherine Wheel cover. There is joy in heat. There is welcome in light. And there is familiarity in dark. There is certainty in cold. But on this night, days after the Cracking Tree Moon, there is the granite-steady comfort in the weak heat of a cold beer with a nostalgic song. And there is great pleasure in the way a pixie-haired siren can sing a song to you with one short look and in that all that needs to be between now and the inevitable thaw is the smoldering warmth of that one single song. Where Comets Come Aground: Roadside VisionBy D.A. Lockhart
Fading light
crashes through bent bar turtle shell. Passing traffic stirs mowed grass. Chikënëm feathers lie beside sycamore trunk. Our vigil comes at the end of a day’s passage between Chatham and Bucktown. Daughter back in city and the two of us stop out of our way. I want to be the way my roots attach to creation. She is loyal, interested. We travel this near-reservation road to illustrate that gravity pulls at us through the ancestors of an ever-expanding past. This roadside monument the point in that past where creation brought Tecumseh home. Fairfield razed by legend-murdering land-hungry American regulars, and here the comet dream came to earth, the warriors at his side. Planted myths in the earth beneath us. About spiral path the pea-stone of comet impacts. Grass, trees, cedar hedges grow up in the spaces between. Beyond the girdle of trees and brush the Thames oxbows and tumbles past, near silent even in the wake of the occasional pick-up, minivan, box truck. We say little. Bathe ourselves in the dirge of a monument to the way heroes and salvation most often flare out. Leaving less hope, less of the world they knew in the ash. Adidas into the cold dump early autumn soil, the heat of impact, of creation is absent. I feel the cold here and all around the bent bars and commemorative plaque grounds left us of a dying confederacy. No council fire to call him back. No fresh burnt coal nor ash to prod heat into the world. Here is the genuine inheritance found only in the words of those absent from this place. Sky grey like a Waawiiyatanong highrise is, all threat in the approaching night. The land holds onto things we wish we could fathom. Burnt remains of a village of those in flight, the Kispoko blood that shall not be washed from this land. Three kilometres up, near the flat top bridge, heron greets our right-hand turn. Over the meander of Deshkan Ziibiing, water drifting westward in antler veins through rich black bottom earth, past dense shoreline brush. We are south and west of the attention bureaucrats and two-term politicians wish to afford a warrior who fought for the familiar not the foreign. Fairfield burned in the aftermath of the comet colliding with earth. Rock, brick, oil and dirt burned into medicine and treaty negotiations for thirteen square kilometres of Bucktown soil. Roadside monuments speak to losses. Rest far from the survivors and fall well below the concern of who will be the Tigers’ starting rotation this year, the price of ground beef at the IGA, and the OPP speed traps on Victoria Rd. Turkey vulture lands struts across tobacco road. Single road to library ends in closed gate, prayer bags. Still smoldering cedar. And we leave quiet as we came. Slipped out on the western edge of the res, where tree-lined roads peter out into ceded farmland, fallow from season or rumours of bureaucratic takeover. We are in the settler nether world that Tecumseh knew enough to fight against and to recognize. In the quiet and slowness of unkempt county roads, I feel the slow drift sadness move in as if fog from melting snow, still caught beneath trees. The density of sublimated vapour demarks the line between res and the farm fields beyond. And it moves foggy across government survey lines, numbered concessions, and the hydrotower corridors. The weepy eyed return of a grandchild looking and longing for the songs and names of relations. Finding little but the choking weeds of long disused farm fields and the debris of displacing indigenousness from the land. Retention pond throws starlings skyward into the night, between light poles, they are a dark mist of darting fog. Orford road to the great MacDonald Cartier Freeway, our manufactured post-treaty world finds course on patched asphalt rivers and combustion driven currents. We wrap ourselves into a divided highway evening. In the steady stream of transport trucks, SUVs, and minivans the autumn damp earth descends into the radio chatter of coast-to-coast CBC radio music broadcasts. Whitehorse plays out the last light of day near Tilbury. This river current a hundredfold quicker than antlers of water wandering through earth. In the machine-shop steady rumble of Volkswagen beneath my feet I believe that creation itself dreams to push us back to that roadside monument, to the place where the last great confederacy fell. In this the closest approach of night, from the interior of this car, all around me the most simple truth: creation moves along in spite of the markers placed before us and the mythologies they urge us to remember alongside the ones they insist we forget. D.A. Lockhart is the author of five collections of poetry, including Devil in the Woods (forthcoming from Brick Books, 2019) and The Gravel Lot That Was Montana (Mansfield Press, 2018). His work has received generous financial support from the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts. Lockhart holds a MFA in Creative Writing from Indiana University - Bloomington. He is a turtle clan member of the Moravian of the Thames First Nation. He currently resides at Waawiiyaatanong, where he is the publisher at Urban Farmhouse Press.
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