It is brittle now, the remembering, how we drove you East

with your backpack like a totem in the rear seat, so that
you could walk westerly across the continent’s spine,
across the sum of all the provinces, through places
you had been before, and we had been, and the Cree
and the Owlcreek bear and wolves envisioned
when night screams upwind the way stars loose
their valid phantoms.

Now it seems the ready truth
that juxtaposition is just a matter of indifference,
because we have all been where we are going,
into selves, shadows, odd shining, all those places
the mind occupies, or the heart, or a lung at exercise.
You had already passed places you would come into
when we knew your hailing us down, thumb a pennant,
face a roadside flag,

halting our pell-mell island rush.
To go westerly, to walk across the world’s arching top,
you said you had to go east, to know Atlantic salt, kelp
girding rocks at anchor, clams sucking the earth down,
to be at ritual with Europe’s ocean itself, that mindless
sea of barks and brigantines and lonely buoy bells
arguing their whereabouts in the miseries of fog, sing-
ular as canyon coyote.

We promised you holy water
at Cape Tormentine, reaching place of The Maritimes,
a fist thrust ready for Two-Boat Irish Islanders, tenting,
the soft sands at Cavendish, a holy trough of journey,
a wetting place, publican’s house of the first order,
drinks hale and dark and well met and Atlantic ripe
as if everything the bog’s

known the drink has.
It’s more apparent now, after you moved outbound,
or inward on the continent, trailing yourself, dreams,
through wild Nations once ringing one another,
your journey was endless. Nine years now at it,
horizons loose on eternity, trails blind-ending
in a destiny of canyons too deep to be hard,
and your mail comes

like scattered echoes, horse
shoes clanging against stakes in twilight campgrounds,
not often enough or soon enough or long enough,
only soft where your hand touches hide, hair, heart
caught out on the trail, wire-snipped, hungry, heavy
on the skewers you rack out of young spruce.

Out of jail, divinity
school, bayonet battalion, ice-
house but only in winters, asking Atlantic
blessing for your march into darkness, light,
we freed you into flight. You have passed yourself
as we have heading out to go back, up to go down,
away from home just to get home. Are you this way
even now, windward,

wayward, free as the falcon
on the mystery of a thermal, passing through yourself?
You go where the elk has been, noble Blackfoot
of the Canadas, beaver endless in its palatial gnawing,
all that has gone before your great assault, coincident,
harmonic, knowing that matter does not lose out,
cannot be destroyed,

but lingers for your touching
in one form or another, at cave mouth, closet canyon,
perhaps now only falling as sound beneath stars
you count as friends and confidants. Why is your mail
ferocious years apart in arrival? You manage hotels,
prepare salads, set great roasts for their timing,
publish a book on mushrooms

just to fill your pack anew
and walk on again, alone, over Canada’s high backbone,
to the islands’ ocean, the blue font you might never
be blessed in. Nine years at it! Like Troy counting
downward to itself: immense, imponderable, but there.
A year now since your last card, Plains-high, August,
a new book started,

but no topic said, one hand
cast in spruce you cut with the other, your dog
swallowed by a mountain, one night of loving
as a missionary under the Pole Star and canvas
by a forgotten road coming from nowhere.
We wonder, my friend, if you are still walking,
if you breathe,

if you touch the Pacific will Atlantic
ritual be remembered as we remember it: high-
salted air, rich as sin, wind-driven like the final broom,
gulls at havoc, at sea a ship threatening disappearance,
above it all a buoy bell begging to be heard,
and our eyes
on the back of your head.