Canada - America

The train moves out along the shore
of Lake Ontario over bridged bays
and inlets, past Jordan and Dalhousie,
once ship-busy harbours,
that disappear into sallow marsh
then re-emerge as a thousand white wings
rise from the still open water's grey.

Passing uniform acres of small naked trees,
a veteran conductress reveals
she loves to travel this route in spring
when from both sides, blossoms
white and pink overtake the orchards.

Next stop Niagara Falls
Since the 1840s Honeymoon Capital
hard to believe its love-advantage
this December noon.

At the Canadian window side, a passenger,
tucked under her fur-lapel coat, is like me, alone.
A red and blue pom-pom, as if a parting corsage,
fastened to the handle of her big, weathery case.
Can we see some tenderness? desired the sleep-
walking voyeur from Christmas Present
in the  CBC dramatisation on tv last night.

Spanning the primal gorge that divides,
the frontier, has never been easier.
Niagara, narrowed to a single channel,
unveils rock-designs - carvings an artisan
obsessively re-works - confirming a friend's stance
walking two days back along disclosed shingles
by jade rollers: Never seen Lake Erie so low.

The U. S. customs officers board, decorated
with badges sublime as the Falls, and dark-handled guns.
Just the facts, ma'am, it seems
a vintage Dragnet detective requires,
a reinflated Sergeant Joe Friday.
The U. S. recognises one citizenship only,
states the official from his navy windbreaker, disowning
all hyphened nationalities.

Out the stationary window
rusted sumac tops
and purple of wild raspberry canes
look madly similar
to those entangled on the other side.

Pearl necklaces
like contraband
embellish the glass,
tv weather-woman's
promise fulfilled.


Yesterday, in a downtown gift-store,
I looked hard into each jewellery case.
Excuse me, a female stranger held
up two objects
for inspection, You're a man,
which of these rings do you think
my husband would prefer?

In abeyance of a border-zone,
after an irritating delay -
tyre tracks from customs vehicles
having left on tacky ground
decorative arcs -
the train starts to edge forward, wheels squealing
petulantly toward the next land-fall.

At breakfast, my mother mentioned her travels,
during the thirties' Depression, to New York City:
an excited young girl peering out
the rear side-window of the family car.
Slowing up at some lights a youth leapt
from nowhere on to the running board.
Cars had running boards then, mum inserted.
The boy hollered, Got somewhere to stay?
No! the joint answer. He grinned widely,
clutched a door handle, fixed his feet to rubber tread,
hanging on in Keystone Cop style, directed
the family to a nice clean hotel off Times Square.
She spoke, perplexed by that outcome:
him receiving from her dad a five-star tip.

This side, back then, Canadian plates were rare.
During prohibition, a New Yorker fooled,
Haven't you guys smuggled some drink?
What other reason to tour dry America?
In another adventure, I was told, the family
obediently followed an AAA map into Harlem
and after a crazy day ended up begging for sleep.
OK! the hotelier finally conceded,
I guess we can sneak a few whities in.

Into Buffalo the train grumpily shutters and shunts
below high-tension wires spun, tower to tower,
out over hinterland from Niagara's upward smoke,
and under expressway bridges, every warning sign lit.

Between railway cars brash rain splashes down
then turns to indeterminate snow.

Now hardly lighting on quick-passing branchwork
it begins petering from view.
I enter a conversation with an American,
on business, travelling down to New York,
who starts to trace his Italian Irish roots.
Barely breaking into an open exchange
before he asserts, My grandfather was murdered
in 1917. Killed in a village one night
in the Virginia coalfields, him and three others.
No immigrant's grave. Barbed wire pulled tight
round a tree marked where he'd died.
Grandmother, still carrying my father,
was a witness. The truth never came out.
I came back, years on, and saw a bulge
where the trunk had grown over his straps of iron.

Almost all passengers have changed.
I glimpse myself in the dark shivering window, writing,
as if somehow getting to the bottom of it.
Frail winter orchards stretch far back
toward a beginning blacked-out.
Then remember I must phone home when I arrive.

Across café car's arbourite table
my American, fellow journeyer stares
with creased expectancy, stressing tragedy's details;
then adds he's licensed to carry a firearm
and spends the next hour defending his stance
as an American right. I never draw out my gun,
he alleges, as a threat, only to kill. Far ahead
the train hollers and hoots a subdued protracted
warning, moaning onwards, ‘Look out! Look out!' a sole night flying bird's impassioned call.

To him I explain my frenzied reaction -
I see those brisk U. S. customs guards
with their black, polished snug revolvers
and I want to snatch the brute from its holster,
point the snout in their blank faces - reverse
that power - asserting my right to self-annihilation.

The passenger express shifts, back and forth,
toward a reason. Its links squeaking and rattling.
There's nothing to record outside, except
against solid black, orange smudges pass
now and then multiply as a lit-up station nears
that's never half as deserted or packed as in a film.

Through space, a tunnel's opened
as if in a precognitive way to see the unseen
one more long drawn out hoot's expelled
toward Rochester, followed by Syracuse, on to Albany.

Sometimes lights flashing by look distant as stars.
Until, between them and me, I imagine a cosmos.
My mother's journeys down New York State,
in her father's car, were glossed by a quest
for discovery: that kept the Rockefeller Centre,
Street Arabs, Empire State and ‘39 World Fair
on a human scale; made her dreams approachable.

Currently, without a conspicuous illness, she
travels toward her fantastic end, just bit by bit
to a lesser and lesser here and now, from which
there is no return, just as gran once claimed.
One day in the car, of herself and dad, mum said,
 We're shrinking…. Repeated the phrase—
I felt their expanding absence.

Through moisture-leaden night the horn sounds
and resounds; keeps surfacing, far out of its depth.
When my destination's reached the train's
clicketty clack and prolonged hooting goes on.
Over a relaxed dinner, just as a new dialogue starts
I attempt once more to find an image for that
arresting call… its abstruse, repetitive sounding-out.