I. My Canadian Novel
The Newfoundland orphanage playground
and asleep in the stiff nunnery’s bed,
the train was stalled at Portage and Main —
“Just around then my marriage fell apart.”
The pea garden was not just her hobby,
but a metaphor for memory and loss;
when the river ice breaks up in April,
I discover my father kept a mistress.
A journal the other woman’s daughter found,
in a cedar chest full of baby clothes,
was the story of a woman’s courage
and how a war wound kept a man alive.
In the Stamford, Ontario archives,
a historical oddity is unearthed
and pursued into Mediterranean hills —
where they’ve never endured a real winter.
II. My Second, Less Popular, and Even Less Critically Successful Canadian Novel
The woman at the little insurance company.
Georgetown, Ontario. The description
of exquisite unsaids. The turn will not
take place in an Applebee’s parking lot.
The male foil will perish in measure,
likely Mister-with-a-disfigurement
will prove more attuned. Regardless,
he or they will not say “Eat it, nit.”
No mitten too far, no Queen Street too
deconstructed. “The blue lights
spilled over the winter fields as night
gave its last bludgeon.” Sleep, sleep.
The plot thickens when the mother’s file
is discovered and there are suggestions
of New York. Just a weekend, it seemed.
Not that she really loved John Wilkes Booth.
III. My Life as a Canadian Writer
My first short story, “The Provincial Fair,”
was rejected twenty-five times before
it found its home in The Muskoka Review.
From then on it’s all been pretty easy.
I learned the beauty of socialism
from writers so passionate they’d cry
when they didn’t get a grant. We’d go north
and laugh at the thought of Alden Nowlan.
Yes, I have been on the radio!
If you heard that segment of Canada Reads
where a guy recommends the novel version
of Tom Cruise’s Top Gun, that was me.
Now I live and work in Montreal.
All we do is sit in cafés and talk through
the one remaining question of literature:
is it available for free on the Internet?
