Queen Elizabeth Park

I wrote this on a park bench a couple of days ago: Some children were playing in the background. The plan to cut down the trees so that there is a better view seems outrageous to me. We all know the water is there.


Go faster, boy (while the Roseberry Bush looks up at the sky)

Flat noise bands in caterpillar beams of light rise against a freezing tide. The River tries with all of its might to keep moving. Laughter from a child resonates from across the water. She is about to capsize a seadoo. She is making a flag out of shells and green tempura paint.

It was a year ago on this day that her brother died in a seadoo accident. The motor was too fast. She never did like the colours from the fuel that leaked out of the sport and now she looks up at the sky every time she feels the wind pinch her skin.

Her brother saw animals in the sky. He told her about a dream he had one night. Dozens of tigers from a Northern Ontario town were chasing him with streamers in their fur. Red. He couldn’t fly in his dream, but he sure could run fast. A Santa Claus roseberry bush waited for him at the finish line.

With tigers in his own hair did he salute the oncoming snarls from the kittens that were fevered and full of ragweed. A touch of dust in his right nostril and then a sneeze that raised his feet off the ground. All of the tigers gestured the same gesture as they signaled to the boy to go faster. “We’ll get to the Roseberry bush before you will!” They teased his pride until the leaves that were falling from the trees hung on. He stared at them until they froze and he sped on. The leaves were sad to see a boy run so fast.

His teacher sent him home with extra homework that day. He just could not understand how the clock worked. He could not tell the time, and the rhyme that happened along the way only told him to think faster. “Think faster, Boy”. How does the twelve function in relation to itself after it has already been introduced as a day drifter? His teacher never mentioned the moon. And maybe the numbers have masks that they could place on their faces bi-daily, he thought. The numbers didn’t make sense.

His mother asked him to do the dishes, but he would rather beat the tide tonight. The seadoo waited at a dock that had been built forty-four years, twenty-seven days, thirteen hours, fifty-one minutes and six seconds before his birth. It aged with grace over the relentless seasons. The algae loved it so. The sailboats gathered enough strength to say: “The cedars look up at the sky too!” But the boy couldn’t hear them over the sound of the waves underneath the motor. The motor’s laughter was aggressive. All you could see was teeth when you closed your eyes.

One year later, his sister places rocks in her mouth. She leaves her mouth wide opened. Her flag is placed in a tree. It invites the leaves to shout, to fall, and to give themselves to the ground. The tigers in her dream are like painters who paint lines in rows of patterns, self-proclaimed lisps of avenues that follow daydream seasons. Time stops. Her legs, like pipes with chimes, follow the tune of the tide. It goes. Her eyes, looking up.