The Ottawa (2010)

    1

The river slides beneath me, ponderously,
Inexorably into the east, the west
Pours out its heart in rapids, floods and calms,
Emptying into the confluence farther on.

This river, elder highway of the land,
Still churns with echoes heard for centuries:
Of splashing paddles, droplets, sleek canoes,
Laden grunts, and sighs, and river songs.

Then chugs of steamships pushing up the shores,
Of settlers awed to whispers by the wastes,
The shouts of men, the primal scrapes and groans
Of a million logs’ slow journey to the sea.

The river’s current holds it all within:
The history of the people who have come,
Of those who left and those who still endure –
The vast migrations of millennia.

This place, this channel cutting through the rock,
This highway of the north, and east and west,
Still visits with its people in our dreams,
And grants us visions, calls us in our bones

To movement, on and on, to leap across
Geographies of distance in the mind:
Across the hills and lakes, the golden sea,
And the Rockies, to a far-off, ocean shore.


    2

Into the wilds he went, the first, the Fleuve,
Up, up the Ottawa, up the Mattawa,
Across Lake Nipissing, and down French River,
Then Georgian Bay - a thousand mile leap!

There on an island of an inland sea,
“La mer douce” they called it, upon it rests
A monument, worn by waves and winds and rains;
Yet still upon its weathered face it reads:

“Samuel de Champlain by Canoe
A.D. Sixteen hundred and fifteen.
As for me, I labour always to prepare
A way for those willing to follow it.”

Four centuries later, and here I stand
In Ottawa, gazing out towards the east;
I think of those who westward went before,
Who followed Champlain into the wilderness.

The Coureurs-de-bois, The Voyageurs; the men
Who followed the rivers across a continent,
And married in the west with Native girls;
The Métis who arose for a time to rule the plains.

Their echoes rise and spill with liquid ease
Beyond the boundaries that we construct
To separate ourselves in solitudes,
The prisons that we build within our minds.


    3

Beyond the wilds he looked, across the west,
While standing by the stone-wrought citadel,
Quebec, the eldest daughter of the Fleuve,
And Cartier dreamt a river crossed it all,

Of wood and steel, a precious, slender band
Of promise to a people far away,
To men whose tongue was not his own,
Who lived upon a far-off ocean shore.

And Laurier too, he gazed on the golden sea,
The vastness of the spaces in the west,
Where sky was blue infinity, where land
Rolled on forever, its soil rich and black.

Beneath the ripples of the shimmering grass
He saw the future cities and the towns,
The numberless farms, the wealth that would be grown
To feed the world; he saw it from Quebec.

And soon the millions came to Montreal,
And docking on the continental verge,
Began their arduous voyage to the west
Like waves, slow-moving over the rolling land.


    4

The river’s current runs on steadily
And deep, beneath the din of spume and spray;
The storms sweep in and bluster, but they leave,
And still the waters flow unto the sea.

For the river has a way of moving on
Like history, like the motions of the heart,
Which call to us in dreams to leap across
Geographies of separate solitudes.

It calls us all to movement, on and on,
To seek the ancient highways of the mind,
Which cross the hills and lakes, the golden sea,
And the Rockies, to a far-off, ocean shore.

       

   
   
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