Canada Day: impressions of a summer ride

[vaneramos]

(cross-posted to free_write)

I'm always driving from here to tomorrow, along the line of simmering aspens, where road winds past wheat fields, bales behind tractors. The sky sinks in a purple crowd on the hills. Lights twinkle on young corn stems. You are always here when I am away, and you dissolve away quickly when I open my eyes. Your hand slips like the distant car on that sinuous hill.

Along the roadside: berry stands. People bent at the middle, plucking richness and sweetness to store for a distant winter morning. I should gather some, too, make strawberry jam and hope you'll be here with dark fur breaking the cut of your white robe, sipping coffee and holding its mist against pale light, spreading my summer memories on your bite of toast. If I remember closely enough, I feel you there again.

But the highway keeps stretching these green Ontario hills apart, stretching until we drop into the gullet of earth and find our death mixed among nibbling plankton of a far ago seaway. I keep following the path, but meanwhile the story spreads every direction, along furlongs and harrows.

The Lincoln's sparrow has a song, but I haven't learned it yet. Listen by the denser brush along the pine plantation, on the steep hill by the guardrail where someone has planted a cross with the name Rebecca. I draw the vision of a slushy highway out of someone else's grief.

Today it is all haze and heat waves washing the shore of this drumlin as I wind toward home, picking up shells from sifting music on the beach of air. Hollow smoke curls around me. I am here. Can you feel my voice resonate? Do you get the drift of my fingers?