Goreway and Morning Star
by Jacob McArthur Mooney
[ poetry - august 07 ]
A small boy with a cello. Two Sikhs on bicycles. An-
other. Forty/forty - Grits and Tories. Enough small town for days.
Match head eyes sit behind the sidewalk trees, our
masala-hot sun melts the Toronto template, shifts boundaries
and blinds the window of my nation-house.
Welcome to the festival of dignified reserve. Civil service codewords
spark out from the holes in the road. Hunter
orange is easiest for the nightshift to see. Sewer Lane. Rain Drainage.
Three meters to drop. The road team on and on.
Whatever they're mining must be clung in deep, six-foot piles of dirt
on the sidewalk. Unearthing is thought of
as a force of retrieval, but in Malton it's an act of creation. What's left
behind,
The Unearth, gets pounded into pavement.
We build our houses from it, whole streets from the seeds of other peoples'
hand-me-down histories. This asphalt is trilingual.
Walk on it, feel its lumps in your spine. Everything is everything else.
