The Country North of Belleville

Bush land scrub land -  

     Cashel Township and Wollaston

Elzevir McClure and Dungannon

green lands of Weslemkoon Lake

where a man might have some

     opinion of what beauty

is and none deny him

          for miles ---   

Yet this is the country of defeat

where Sisyphus rolls a big stone

year after year up the ancient hills

picknicking glaciers have left strewn

with centuries' rubble

          backbreaking days

          in the sun and rain

when realization seeps slow in the mind

without grandeur or self deception in

         noble struggle

of being a fool --

A country of quiescence and still distance

a lean land

     not like the fat south

with inches of black soil on

     earth's round belly --

And where the farms are

     it's as if a man stuck

both thumbs in the in the stony earth and pulled

         it apart

          to make room

enough between the trees

for a wife

     and maybe some cows and

     room for some

of the more easily kept illusions --

And where the farms have gone back

to forest

     are only soft outlines

     shadowy differences --

Old fences drift vaguely among the trees

     a pile of moss-covered stones

gathered for some ghost purpose

has lost meaning under the meaningless sky

     --- they are like cities under water

and the undulating green waves of time

     are laid on them --

This is the country of our defeat

     and yet

during the fall plowing a man

might stop and stand in a brown valley of the furrows

     and shade his eyes to watch for the same

     red patch mixed with gold

     that appears on the same

     spot in the hills

     year after year

     and grow old

plowing and plowing a ten-acre field until

the convolutions run parallel with his own brain ---

And this is a country where the young

          leave quickly

unwilling to know what their fathers know

or think the words their mothers do not say --

Herschel Monteagle and Faraday

lakeland rockland and hill country

a little adjacent to where the world is

a little north of where the cities are an

sometime

we may go back there

          to the country of our defeat

Wollaston Elzevir and Dungannon

and Weslemkoon lake land

where the high townships of Cashel

          McClure and Marmora once were ---

But it's been a long time since

and we must enquire the way

          of strangers --