Lake Superior Coast

Blue waters from the recent trip west.

LAKE SUPERIOR COAST: TRAIN WINDOW

East of the port, the gaunt euclidean town

At the edge of the prairie sky, at the venturous end

Of the sea's last traffic with the climbing land ---

You come to the hills. The spruce and rock steep down

To the mountain beach. Inlet and channel and reef
Return, in the slow dance of the land's turning;
Shadowed and clear and dark in the desolate raining
Of lost and shadowy light, and the lost brief

Moment; flashed and repeated in the drumming wheels
Repeat . . . repeat . . . repeat: the flashing earth
Streams in its rhythm; and the moments breath
Is time's deliberate breath. The wheeling hills
Drift with its tide . . . The hills and the quilted flock
Of the sky, and a gull, remotely flying
And stilled in flight . . .
                                     Time, and the granite flowing
Of stonegrey water and precambrian rock.

Charles Bruce
The Mulgrave Road; selected poems of Charles Bruce,
Potterfield Press, Nova Scotia,1985, page 54.

I got the book I mentioned in this previous post! And then I picked out the same poem that I chose from the Canadian Nature Poems anthology, and typed it out again! At least I am consistent. Here is another choice; it's a lovely book, I am glad I was able to locate a copy. This one was WITHDRAWN from the Winnipeg Public Library, and now belongs to me.  .  .