Runaway Dreams (4 page)

She's gone now the old Embassy Hotel. She used to sit on

the curve that dipped down into Port Dalhousie where we'd

go to sit and watch girls on the antique carousel and smoke

and drink and talk about cars and women and fights we'd

seen and he'd tell me about life on the boats and how the

St. Lawrence came to smell of everything that ever went to float

on her and how if you listened hard enough you could hear

those tales leaned over the rail in the fog come mornings

aiming for port. He told a good joke, too. He'd laugh like a

bastard and slap me on the back and pull me into it so that I

laughed too even though I didn't always understand what he

meant. I was just an under-aged kid slinging beer for seamen

for eighty bucks a week and living upstairs in a shitty room

beneath his, and hell, I needed heroes so bad back then that

a rough old tar was a blessing even if he was prone to two-

week speed benders and I had to talk him down sometimes

or get him out from under the bed when the paranoia drove

him into hiding and feed him soup and crackers and roll him

smokes and watch him while he shook when the turkey hit all

hard and fast. Still, he watched out for me. He'd bowleg into

the tavern, slap me on the back, and make a show for the big

boys that I knew somebody too tough to fuck with, then grab

a couple drafts and sit beside the shuffleboard to wait for a

game. He was a rough old bird. When I went to jail that first

time for fighting he said I only bought the time because I

won and if push came to shove in there to “eat mutton, say

nuttin'.” He'd done a few stretches himself a few years back so

my twelve days were nothing but he was waiting when I came

back with a yellow ribbon wrapped around the doorknob to

my room and he laughed like hell when I saw it and then he

bought me a beer. “You're bigger than this,” he said. “You got

more in you.” I nodded even though I didn't understand what

he meant or saw in me and when I left there to chase summer

across Canada in a beat-up car I bought for a hundred
bucks

he stood and watched and waved until I disappeared around

the curve. No one had ever waved goodbye before and I had

to hold tight to the wheel and set my chin to the country

and drive and drive and drive until the bruised feeling waned

into something grey and manageable. Almost forty years later

I think I understand. Bards sometimes sit in crummy rooms

scoffing a six pack and a hoagie, smoking roll-yer-owns and

waiting for the man to come with dreams in a baggie, betting

horses and drowning in old mariner tales. It's not all just

about glory and the shiny people who make it to the top.

What makes this country tick for kids like I was then are guys

like Huk, tough as hell and scrambling for a dollar, taking

love on the installment plan, givin' 'er the best they can and

letting young guys know they got better in them because

they learned somehow to see contrast through the gloom.

Well Huk, I got 'er now. Pass it on the best you can because

what you know is what you know, and you're a richer man

for seein' what you seen and a port in the fog is still a port.

If you're gone now and cold and reaching out for one last

beer, my guess is that you'll make it . . .

I heard Fats Waller play one night

when the rain beat upon the slatted tin roof

of a cabin set against the rib of bush

somewhere beyond what I'd come to know as time

a wobbly candle flame

set the hornet's nest in the corner into motion

it danced in the magic of that night

that flame, that piano

and I fell in love with the 1920s

the simplicity of line and time and metre

and how it fit with rain

beating on a tin roof

a thousand tiny heartbeats like mine

surrendered to lonely

there are dreams that come to men as I was then

nomadic, transient, rootless, afraid perhaps

that time was like the road

always in front of you and never truly here

those dreams were visions and the quest of them

was what lifted a thumb to waggle and hook at cars

bearing hard for Winnipeg, Swift Current

then the foothills and the mountains tumbling down

to wide expanse of ocean

that was itself a dream dropped beyond the horizon

that itself was never really here

dreams of how the warmth of skin might feel

beneath a calloused palm

the cleft and cliff and scarp of bone

and hair and the smell of living

riding on each softly exhaled breath

in time suspended

and dreams of talk

the syllables of truth spilled off lips and tongue and teeth

to fill the air between us like clouds

roiling and turning and tumbling

with the energy of souls who have just discovered

that freedom rings best on turns of phrase that say

“I see you here” and “stay”

and dreams of lawns and things

the idle clutter that sits like islands in the stream of our living

redolent with history and song

like Waller's piano against the dark and the tattoo of rain

on that tin roof in the bush so far removed

from the light that breaks over things you've built

by hand

and heart

and hope

and dreams of time held in the hand

inspected with the gaping look of wonder

that you see on children's faces

when they become surprised by the ordinary

and dreams of sound and smell

the taste of things like the lilt of fresh baked bread

and the spot of skin just behind the ear

that holds within it the taste of many things

like faith and home and love

and the sound of spirits dancing in the ripple of curtains

in a window overlooking a yard

where flowers bloom in pots

where we dirtied our fingers and joined the earth to us again

I heard Fats Waller play as the rain pelted down

against an old tin roof and didn't know

that I dreamed of you

I can't hear that old piano now

without a sense of loss and celebration for this man

who found his way to you

down the road that led to the line in the sky

that led in course to the ocean

of our dreams come true

right here, right now, this room

where the feel of your skin against my palm

pulses like a simple line in a simple time and simple metre

like rain on the tin roof of my soul

The back of my head is pocked and marred

with scars I mostly don't remember getting

one time I fell in a drunken haze

against rocks along the Bow River

and opened myself severely

no stitches though, that would have been weak

and two-fisted gulpers as I was then

had no time for namby-pamby baby things

like doctors, anesthetic or thread pulled taut

in a seam to stem the flow of blood

I wear my hair short these days

and new barbers comment on the bare field

of it beneath the hair like a landing strip for pain

“musta been a whack” they say

and me in not so subtle denial have been

known to say “yeah, but chicks dig it”

the truth is

that I don't know that they do

bad boys create their own mythologies

in order to cope with frailty and failings

as though faulty legends and tall tales could replace

the truth of things in matters of the heart

Paul Bunyan outranks Tiny Tim

in our minds only and women get that

and it's the measure of our lack

that buffoons as I was didn't

I do now

but of course, I'm far more sensitive at fifty-five

than I was at twenty-three and time has a way

of bringing you to your knees

at the shrine of your own undoing

hell, even outlaws learn to cry if they listen

to themselves long enough

and there are a lot of cellblocks with tear stained pillows

clenched in tattooed fists

anyone or anything I ever fought

was only me in disguise

I get that now just as I've learned

that reaching out takes a lot more guts

than pushing away

and tall tales are better saved for firesides

when hurt's involved

there are scars from knives and bats and fists

that create a map of everywhere I fell

without knowing that I did

and there are scars from falling on broken bottles

careless work with tools and simple

drunken buffoonery that I eased with lies

because the truth was so embarrassing

my skin is broken territory

and my heart went along for the ride

but I've learned to see my scars as something

far more telling than the fables and tall tales

I created just to manage having been an idiot

more than a handful of times over time

because stitches and the billboards of bare spots

only mark the places I deserted myself

in my search for rest

outlaws in their hideouts dream

of a gentle touch and curtains

far more often

than they give away

There's a silence words

leave in their wake

once they're spoken

that's the true punctuation

of our lives

like

when I said “I love you”

the full colon stop

made my heart ache

until you continued

the phrase and said

dash

“I love you too”

period

for Anne Doucette and Michael Findlay

Dvorak wrote the “Serenade for Strings”

in just twelve days and trudging through

the snow drifts along the bluffs above

the North Saskatchewan River with Saskatoon

huffing its breath across the frozen fling

of it in the valley, the violas sashay

in waltz time through the headphones

and I tuck my chin closer to my chest

and walk in counterpoint to the edge

and gaze in rapt wonder at the skill of

this Czech composer and the hand of Creator

at work together in the same morning

twinkling with frost

the river current buckled ice and sent

shards of it upward hard into a January

sky pale blue as a sled dog's eye

and the ice crystals in the air wink

in the sun like spirits dancing

so that Dvorak's masterpiece becomes

a divertimento to the history that clings

to the banks of this river and there's

something in the caesura that harkens

to a voyageur's song perhaps when

this river bore stout-hearted strangers

into places where only the Cree

and the buffalo could last the bitter

snap of the Long Snow Moons

and starvation was the only verb

in a language built on nouns

crows hop across the drifts

like eighth notes and the larghetto

when it eases in as wistful as a

prayer for home becomes the idea

that we're all voyageurs really

paddling relentlessly for points beyond

what we've come to know of ourselves

and time and the places we occupy

so that history whether it comes

in a serenade, a fugue, a chanson

or a chant sung with drums

made of deer hide becomes

the same song eventually and rivers

like this contain it

hold it, shape it to us

so it rides loose and easy

on our shoulders

Dvorak wrote the “Serenade” in 1875

and turning to the city now

marching to the beat of the teeth

of the wind that churns upward

suddenly out of the valley

Saskatoon becomes the everywhere

of my experience and I ride the current of it

to the resolution of the theme