21

And what is it to be transfixed
as a child, in love, already
modelling or bullying a schematic,
a feigned world beyond one’s world
of Essex County’s Bible-edged

sunsets, spring swamps and canola.
That centrifugal glide—little brother
of wild Stig and a Sami father dead
in a mine—in your Jofa lid, pewter
bracelet, and Daoust blades

I could neither source nor say,
that stride and elegance Kiruna
had raised then thrown
to the xenophobic wolves of Philly,
Boston, buffalo, us. Our king.

My love now lifts the disinterred
skull of an unknown grunt whose
face was split in half, 1461,
in the snow at Towton and talks us
through the carnage, that’s Borje’s

face, the face I carry and wear
under my own as armour
in a campaign of losing and losses.
“28,000 dead in a day.”
206 stitches and back on the ice

after three days. “Two claimants
to the crown and no quarter given.”
Backbone of the Kronor
whose half-visor and hyper-awareness
I longed for from within my face-cage.

Sun dogs over the soft ice of a rink
in Tecumesh. Over Mortimer’s Cross.
To Dave Hodge on our Panavision
I said I’d hoped one day for a scar
like that, so my father kicked

my head at the curved screen.
There was blood on the ice, a blue
to the blazer and the leaf
blazoned onto the freezing white
river.

( This poem first appeared in the West End Phoenix, who have graciously granted us permission to reprint it. )