What Last Golden River Run:
17 Canoe Poems for Autumn
By Lenny Everson
rev 2
Copyright Lenny Everson 2011
For Dianne, my paddle-partner.
This free ebook may be copied, distributed, reposted, reprinted and shared, provided it appears in its entirety without alteration, and the reader is not charged to access it.
Cover design by Lenny Everson
****
Chapter 1: Octobering My Soul
October:
Rain at dawning. Warm breakfast, but I
ended up at the window, gray-feeling.
At nine the clouds headed for Quebec
leaving stunning blue on the world's ceiling.
Got the canoe on the car, feet soaked with dew, and
on the water by ten-thirty, making paddle-whirlpools,
Octobering my Canadian soul. I tell you, I went
down the lake for no particular reason.
Portaged just to step on crackling orange leaves
or maybe just to ruffle a grouse. I think
eternity could start this way. I wouldn't
mind. I wouldn't mind at all.
--
Notes: The days in October are short, and often cloudy. Rain, sometimes snow. Not the best way to end anything, including a year. The rivers, and Ontario’s one million lakes, are abandoned to the winds and the occasional duck hunter.
But there are usually a few topaz days in October. Clear air and clear water and all the hills are a-dazzle with colour.
The warm sunshine competes with a chill breeze, and the geese overhead remind you that this day is a present, wrapped in coloured ribbon.
I can read this poem and I hear the sound of bright leaves underfoot on the portage. This is where time should stop for me. (If I don’t get a lighter canoe or lose some weight, it just might someday.)
****
Chapter 2: But I Had Red Mitts
The river ran brown past brown trees
The sky slid, brown, to the south
Brown ducks flew by
Brown on brown on brown
It was like canoeing through
A Victorian photograph
I had red mitts
Thank God
****
Chapter 3: November Paranoia
Warm day in late November it's raining
It happens
They say winter never lasts forever
- trees turn green
- ice melts
- the river turns blue again
Hey, I don't know
As I grow older, I get more suspicious
--
Notes:
Q. What’s long and hard on a Canadian?
A. Winter
In November, sometimes, my soul becomes the colour of long-fallen wet leaves. Some days I’ve learned to love the brown, brown land, the scudding clouds, and the cold rains. Some days I take pictures of those landscapes and don’t know what to do with them.
But some days just remind me that winter’s coming and I’m a summer boy.
Nobody but me likes these two poems, and I like only the first one, anyway.
****
Chapter 4: September Question
Ah, love, could we find but one
Of all the dreams we lost
Would we pick it up again
Regardless of the cost?
Would we trade September’s days
For what we missed back then?
Would we take a different portage, now
Or do our route again?
Almost asleep in the canoe
In the quiet of a weedy bay
You touch the question carefully
And smile, as if to say:
It doesn’t matter how rough the route
When you’ve finally camped in peace
Sometimes the shelter matters most
And the passage matters least.
--
Notes: In the September of our lives I wrote this poem to ask the question, “If we had to do it all again, would we?”
It is Dianne who answers the question, and only with a “sometimes.”
We’ve always loved September, every year, because the crowds are gone, and we have the lakes and quiet bays to ourselves. Our daughter, our only child, was born in September. But not, rumour to the contrary, in a canoe.
This poem is a popular one, maybe for the sense of tranquility, or maybe for the answer to the question.
****
Chapter 5: Tying Down Canoes
Somewhere past Alberta the winter walks on diamond feet
Shuffles across the prairies in sparkling shoes of sleet
The day, today, is sunny, but the northwest whispers rain
It’s November, in Ontario, and I prepare the canoes again
And yet, the moving sun is warm on me
And yet - the river outside town is sliding free
And tying down canoes is hard on me
The hulls are hieroglyphics traced in curving lines of white
Two passports stamped by passages I didn’t get quite right
My heart, too, is marked by river brook and lake
I tie the blue canoe to another driven stake
And yet there’s five more hours to this day
And a lovely stretch of river not so far away
And I find covering canoes is hard this day
A heretic pause lengthens as I contemplate the sky
And snow and moving water and a thousand reasons why
The last brown leaves of willows where the river makes a bend
And the aching way of autumn things that may not come again
The moment lost has not been spent on me
Tethered to the truth is never to be free
And tying down canoes is hard on me
--
Notes: Sometimes, even in November, a weather system called an “Alberta clipper” develops out west then comes barreling eastward towards me, my canoes, and the places I like to canoe. It means the season’s over, and it’s time to put the canoes up off the ground, cover them with tarps, and tie them down.
I think the first two lines are among the best I’ve written. And maybe I’m partial to the last line. Because season endings are hard. Many endings are hard.
****
Chapter 6: What Last Golden River Run?
In the autumn sunlight
What new route shall we take?
What last golden river run
Cross what last blue lake?
Do October’s embered hills
Mention the small word, “where”
Or, like some neon Vegas act
Can they just “be there”?
Ask me some other lesser month
For schedule, reason, plan
Today laughs at “I shall, I will”
And blazes out, “I can!”
Notes: There’s no time in autumn to redo the canoe routes we did in warmer weather. The year is running out and it’s dark way too early. The last chance to find new water comes in the fall. Maybe I want to end the year the way the trees do – going out in glory.
There’s an intensity to the fall experience. The lake waters clear out and the air’s so clean the sunlight almost gouges me.
We’re both older, now, and we take each lake more slowly, enjoying reflections, leaves falling onto water, and the last flowers growing out of a crack in a shoreline rock.
****
Chapter 7: To the Edges of Drown and Sing
It was too cold to be on the water
The shores of wi
nter groaned at the edges of the province
The sky was the arctic’s lesser brother
Out to conquer souther lands
Much too cold to be on the water
What the hell, I thought, that’s what a canoe
Is for
To carry us to the edges of cold fish and air
To the edges of drown and sing
And in the long run, cold white hunts us all
Life was always an edge of sorts
Our unwilling temporary challenge to cold white
It was too cold not to be on the water
Notes: I wrote this for a guy up at Algonquin Outfitters, who wanted a canoe poem about canoeing in November, but didn’t care for rhyme.
Algonquin Outfitters had taken to putting a copy of my poems, back when I wrote and mailed one each month, on the men’s toilet wall. They made extra copies because people kept stealing them. I took it as a compliment.
So I wrote him this one. He liked the line about the “edges of drown and sing,” he said. So I’ve made it the title.
I’ve gone canoeing in November – and even December – and I’ve seen the cold look in the eye of the water. It’s an experience.
****
Chapter 8: Sonnet for September
As I canoe September’s quiet days
I leave another summer in my wake
Receding, fainter, fading into haze
Like passing ripples fade on summer lake
As I pass, the waters close behind
The bass returns to watching rocky ledge
No trace I leave for man or loon to find
The smallest ripples die at water’s edge
Summer’s wake is fading gently, now
The mind forgets the dates, the scenes misplaced
And I, near some September riffle-pool
Pause while Ontario turns cool
To wonder at the season’s routes I’ve traced
And all the waters gone beneath my bow
Notes: September is the month for contemplating things. (October is for exhilaration, and November is for watching movies.)
****
Chapter 9: Sonnet for November
Compass Lake is cold and dark these days
Clouds slide by, just touching barren hill
The atmosphere goes east, the dampness stays
It looks like rain, and maybe further chill
November’s gusty winds recharge the lakes
With air that ought to last the fish till thaw
I’ve come to watch the way the land retakes
Itself from me. The winds grow further raw.
I’m three portages from the highway now
And have the feeling I’ve been told to leave
I cannot trust this wind, nor like the sky
And when I feel the water, I like not how
The shock of cold is felt. Believe:
November lakes bid summer men goodbye.
Notes: Winter is when Mama Nature stops playing nice with you. November’s her warning.
In winter, when the lake’s covered with ice, there’s not much oxygen for the fish. So the winds of November have a purpose. But in November the winds seem stronger, the waves bigger. And the canoe seems too small sometimes.
****
Chapter 10: October is the Church of God
October is the church of God
Built in yellow leaf
It calls for not the slightest doubt
Impels, instead belief
Each lake’s a chalice deep with time
Craft with fish and dreams
That give us faith the world is more
Than merely what it seems
The final portage takes you through
Aisles of quiet beech
The geese the choirs of Eden
Now brought within your reach
--
Notes: This is one of Dianne’s favourites.
****
Chapter 11: The Vanishing Month
Halfway home in the sunshine
In the slow and patient September sunshine
I picked some late violet flowers
That you set in the canoe beside you
Without comment
The pond is stiller, now
The sky and water become
Clearer again, the fields yellow
With patience
Ah, love, September
The vanishing month;
Ten degrees cooler at night,
And Canadians start preparing for
Winter again
--
Notes: Each September I pick a flower when the canoe gets close enough to a rocky shore or deep enough into swampy areas to find a lotus. I put it onto the flat of my paddle and pass it to Dianne, at the front of the canoe.
Strange, the way the waters are abandoned in September. The weather people say summer here starts in the first week of June and ends in the first week of September. But as soon as school starts, the waters are left to those of us unlikely to be successfully further educated.
Some days I think I am too much like September.
****
Chapter 12: November Dance
Too early, the wind is dancing with the night
The canoes are blocked, plastic-wrapped and still
By nine, the rain will dress itself in white
And waltz in darkness’ arms across the hill
In the basement, varnished paddles now reflect
The ropes and hats and sundry summer gear
The packs are hung on pegs, the shelves collect
The sorted debris of another year
Outside, November dances with the year
The trees outside tango in the rain
I make sure the basement floor is clear
And, carefully, I roll the tent again.
--
Notes: Tents don’t really want to go back into the nylon bags they occupied last spring in the stores. But things have to be put away or I’ll be tripping over memories and stakes all winter.
All summer nature is my lover, but when November comes, she’s out dancing with forces a lot bigger and meaner than I am. Then it’s time to retire to interiors.
****
Chapter 13: The One-Pine Inn
The evening water’s still as space
And as clear as London gin
I sit beside the fireplace
Down at the One-Pine Inn
The residents murmur quietly
And inspect my tender skin
Approving of the evening meal
Served at the One-Pine Inn
There’s dirt beneath my fingernails
And hair on my unshaved chin
But nobody seems to really mind
Here at the One-Pine Inn
The supper is stew, as usual
Served in a sooty tin
But it’s hot and filling and what I need
For my stay at the One-Pine Inn
I had to park my own canoe
And drag my own stuff in
And after midnight it gets right chill
In October, at the One-Pine Inn
But the Management responds to all complaints
With an awkward lunar grin
And serves an after-dinner round of peace
Again, at the One-Pine Inn
****
Chapter 14: Camping Alone
Don’t camp alone; in the early night
Pterodactyls leap
And thrash in trees above your head
Gnashing about, as you try to sleep
The long October darkness brings
Krakens in from the dark, dark lake
Touching the shore, caressing the canoe
Keeping such as I awake
Wraith winds threaten midnight rain
Dead leaves fall, starved and bent
And close outside, the pad, pad, pad
Of direwolves snuffling around the tent
&n
bsp; Unless you’re deaf, don’t camp alone
In bed at six, asleep at four
The autumn nights are far too long
When spent alone, on forest floor
--
Notes: When I camped with Dianne, I was pretty sure that she wasn’t going to be able to protect me from escaped tigers or misplaced grizzly bears. Yet I slept like an oak log (except for my snoring, of course) in a flimsy nylon tent the middle of nowhere. The loons on the lake and the rustling of leaves just lulled my weary body.
But when I camped alone, it took till after midnight to get to sleep. There were always sounds which I couldn’t identify and which my subconscious refused to ignore, despite my civilized logic. When I’d eliminated anything in the current biology books as being capable of making such sounds, I was left with things imprinted onto my genes by ancestors long gone.
Part of me was always surprised to wake up in the morning, uneaten.
I’m the only one that likes this poem, actually.
****
Chapter 15: The Canoe Becomes the Passage
But still I think of distances
With time enough to share
I would not give you promises
I would only take you there
The canoe becomes the passage
The paddles suffer love
The moment comes from gravity
With nothing from above
I’ll show you where the river ends
Beyond a hill or two
I’ll bind within an azure line
The moment, me, and you
For us there are distances
In October’s jewelled air
I’ll teach you where the rivers end
Come - if you dare
--
Notes: Holy Mazinaw! What the heck am I talking about in this poem?
Send answers; maybe win a prize.
****
Chapter 16: Necropolis
Half a day in Sepiatown
Six miles on the Grand
Necropolis of November
River, sky, and land
Brown. On brown. On brown.
A norther threatens rain
The nudge and nuzzle of amber flow
Shoves us downstream again
Two neurotic nomads, centered
In November’s numbing hue
The colding wind attacks the skin
Drops leaves on our canoe
We paused to steal some apples
And left the cores behind
So shared the water with a resurrection
Cold, deaf, and blind
--
Notes: Al and I went on an afternoon canoe ride on the Grand River, north of the covered bridge. It was only a few hours, but it was a world where everything else that wasn’t dead had either gone into hibernation or was heading for warmer climates.
Along the shore was an apple tree, with apples that had fallen into the water. We tried them: not bad. I bit into the core and saw the seeds there,
and suddenly it struck me that the those seeds were a promise of spring. Then I knew that the whole landscape wasn’t dead; it had just gone to sleep.
I’ve always liked this poem. That makes one of us, anyway.
****
Chapter 17: Not Because
Not because I promised myself
Last winter, kicking snow off the car
Not because I told myself I would
When summer's heat was gone
What Last Golden River Run: 17 Canoe Poems for Autumn Page 1
