1.
You emerge from eclipse,
a bat over sleeping waters –
tongue stuck to black ice,
wet handprints burning, find me.
The lake has frozen my footfalls,
your senses – echoes
the lighthouse bouncing
its tired signal in alarm.
A flood of well-wishers disembark
in a rush of high heels,
fishermen swap their catch
for the comfort of a hot meal.
Your motel room still won’t dry –
an ice bucket overrun with rust,
stained wallpaper that tears
like a streak of chalk.
2.
The summer we painted your room blue,
rain began to ransack the forest.
You embraced the deluge like a cutter,
licked the scars that mapped your forearms and wrists
the candy apple shimmer of your apnea,
swelling like blood in the scored veins of the lake.
I dream of your feet rooting on the bottom,
carbon puffs of red discolouring the tide –
your fingers begin to dull and forget your hands,
the hyacinths we scatter on your bed.
It won’t be long before you swim
as if water is all you’ve ever known.
3.
We’re losing daylight. Your breath is
ragged, tubercular, your oar is lead.
It polarizes the tides as if your hands
are magnets, pushes us home. The
shore repeats itself – brothers already
know one another’s stories. We both
curse as we lift the nets, empty of all
but mosquitoes, our bony fingers
sifting through.
*
That never happened. You were gone
by the time we looked for you. The
riverbed stared back with eyes of
limestone, heavy lids. In the afternoon
heat, I managed to propel the canoe on
my own, the tides a vicious watercolour.
Peaks of stained glass inclined like a
steeple, pinned my weak strokes to
the shore.
4.
By spring, you are reduced
to a hurricane of sand and shells,
an abandoned beach.
I imagine sailing again,
the weight of your body,
the grip of your hand, easily given.
Sand spreads like an atlas,
the shore a whisper where I dip
my feet in the undertow.
Each time I flinch at the mandible
of a surfacing muskellunge,
your laughter scalds my face.
The dock whines, ties me
to the skeleton of this country,
my bones on your bones.
Honourable Mention
Hart House Poetry Contest