1854, the settler’s wife, her husband sentenced to fifteen years for stealing sheep.  Herein the official’s list of her possessions:

Two old tables, three old stools, two cooking pots of iron,
camp oven, tea kettle, frying pan, three dishes and a bucket
One dish had a cover
four plates, one cracked;
A cruet stand complete,
one salt cellar, one pepper mill
a clothes box, table cloth
table oil cloth,
a wool mattress
and EIGHT books.

One barrel, one auger, one adze
a handsaw, two knives, a grindstone
a plane, a spade, two axes, a jack plane
a square, ironwork
scythe and sickles eight of the latter
two hundred post nails
and fifty feet of timber

Eight ale and porter casks
fifty pounds of salt

She had three sows, one boar, twelve sucking pigs,
seven chickens, a cockerel
three “whippentines”?

and four small childen

We played cribbage all one winter
danced, and danced
He carried my water buckets
lit the fire in the basement
helped my mother
kissed me

Both knew we were only friends
and did not keep in touch

Ghosts haunt my dreams
You lie quiet in the stoned grave

I hope you meant it when your said, “Go forward.”
I have loved and roamed again

You met me in that wet and windy town
I remember those first nights
that you no longer share

They say old age is time for memory
but memory is not an honest broker
rather one that plays the game
as if it were a pot of prizes
fished from time to time
with random results

I think you would approve my choice
whose touch awoke
even that is long ago
He and I
faithful in old age
and gentle as you would have me be
and that you gave me permission
comforts me

Pollution in the wind
banks of my memory
spammed out

Weary of travel I return to the Isle of the beloved
Isle of the Great White Owl
Isle where my hammock sways beneath tall willows
Place born of my dreaming
place where dreams came true
when we danced with the owl women
and learned each other.

 I dreamed of wild horses
wild horses fighting
wild horses
I might have to ride
Two palominos  filled with anger
hurt for each other in every stride
biting and kicking
furiously running
Why would I ride?
Where would  I ride wild horses?

Morning
the little cat goes in and out
unable to decide whether wind and rain
are dangerous

Above the walk
the giant fronds of the palm
have no shadows
but cry out

The leaves of the grape vine
squish underfoot
and the dove’s voice
cannot be heard

Misty, the old cat from next door
refuses to leave her cosy spot
but the kitten looks at me
expecting me to turn off the weather

What is this long silence?
Has the circle been completed?
Words gone missing?
AWOL, the slippery thoughts
refuse to be named.
I knew flowers, yellow round
morning gleaming
named for a larger universe
now brown and faded as the winter
breaks stems
dark waters frown at the roots.

Why the long silence?
The worn thesaurus sits unopened on the shelf
a torn page
Was that the place you last looked?
I seek out crimson
find darkness
a circle drifts, a bubble
slippery, delicate, pale on the water
winding to break against the nearest rock
completed now
and lost.

All is distraction
the house that will not clean itself of dust or deritus;
garbage from a hundred trips of guilt
clogging the memory of a precious night;
the phone call advertising some useless other thing
and my shame at my rude reply;
the socks I did not mend
but thought it somehow important
enough to keep the socks;
the clothesline of life
pegged crooked
while I failed to see
the sun break pink against the pines
or scent of a thousand mornings.

>I meant to draw you
but instead
found colours dancing
in my head

This is the way we went to school
went to school
went to school
This is the way we went to school
on a cold, cold, prairie morning

Marion left last year
I can no longer send her word
or thoughts
or memories
yet I still hear her voice,
rich in the lore of her own race
her wide ranging intelligence,
advice I often failed to take
yet knew, and in that knowing grew
a little wiser with my own long years
I miss her, for only Marion could remember
than I was once a child.

A mystery ship on a misty tide
floats silent, its passengers sleeping
waiting for a signal
from an empty window

We were two children dreaming. I have his letters in the old trunk that stays in a basement in a distant land; letters from Akyab to a girl he’d known for such a little time. The letters told of chasing cows for the company to eat–I did not know or fully understand why the fly-boy, the English city lad, should be chasing cows for the company to eat–but then everything is strange in wartime.

Now I know better, know why a lad of twenty wrote and wanted my letters: The Glass Palace by Amitav Ghosh, a novel, brings that history back to me. Those troubled days made clear, I’ll ask my son to send the letters and be able to read between the lines with greater understanding of the importance of Ron’s clinging to the memory of a couple of weekend visits to a gentle prairie town , shared laughter, a few kisses and a cuddle on Mrs G’s sofa.

What was he seeing? I lost touch when he went back to England and I thought it too much for him to come back to a girl he’d dreamed but did not really know. Would all that he had seen have changed him? How could it have not been?

A new baby is sleeping quietly on the end of the couch
She is weary from being placed in a box
wrapped in a net
to come the long two kilometres from the Haven
to her new home.
She is a pretty wee thing
and we shall love her.
Only nine weeks old she already has a very good purring machine
and a very strong voice when confined to that carrier.
The lady in the cat haven was dubious indeed about
letting two such oldies adopt! She tried to be polite about telling me that
the wee cat might outlive us, and, moreover she really had serious doubts about my walking stick. Twice reminded that a kitten might live twenty years, I had to reassure her by telling her my daughter was very fond of cats, and that I had a fair knowledge of kitten needs and kitten housing. Somehow I think suspicion remained: What would happen to the precious kitty when this old person goes into a nursing home? And here I thought that having pets was one of the ways of keeping very old persons minds in shape!

I could not work

I went to sleep

I slept the afternoon away

The gazebo was in the gentle shade

and a raven, two white cockatoos

a tiny rainbow parrot

whispered all is well

if you wait

Long ago I attended a workshop in Saskatchewan, in the Valley they call Qu’Appel Where our teacher, mentor and great poet carried us into the places of the heart where poetry is. Robin Skelton was a wizard, or so he claimed, a wizard of voice, of exorcism , who once stood on the steps of the Canadian Parliament and exorcised some folk! A man of humour, a man of sense and sensitivety who, nonetheless needed his practical and patient wife to keep him in reality. A charismatic character, guru perhaps, but above all a teacher who knew how to lead our imaginative lives to words and to make words sing. Eccentric was ok too. There will never be another Robin but I would wish that everyone who wanted to be a writer could find his sort. Fran