Recently, I suggested that women in an online writing circle gather three small objects to write about. It’s a tactile approach to writing and memory that brings about some fascinating and satisfying results.

With three objects, there can be a beginning, middle, and end. The objects can relate to one another as mine did about my grandmother, mother, and an ancient earth-based culture. Or there could be no apparent connection – except the objects belong to the same person – and the juxtaposition with the descriptions and memories can make the piece all the more fascinating.

Here’s what I wrote (as a first draft in the writing circle):

An amulet rests on Grandma’s handkerchief with it’s crocheted trim – The Dreaming Goddess of Malta. I haven’t been to Malta but I’m interested in earth-based spirituality where women were honoured and celebrated. The Dreaming Goddess is from the Neolithic period and her advice for today is not to take action but rather to daydream, be still, imagine. Imagine a healing place for women. Imagine.

Grandma always had some crocheting on the go if she wasn’t sitting at the quilting frame with other women in the farming community or reading her bible. Pillowcases got crocheted edges and so did handkerchiefs. It’s funny about that word – a hand kerchief. From the German perhaps. Grandma’s mother was from Germany Her father from Ireland. Her children all born in Canada. [Actually, from the Old French I found out later.]

My mother lived on the 30th floor of a 50-storey building. A restaurant close by was a favourite of hers as they served an Asian specialty called Rainbow in a Crystal Fold. A colourful, finely diced mix of vegetables and meats (the “rainbow) was spooned into fresh, crispy lettuce leaves (the crystal fold). The name was rather magical and the dish was delicious. That’s what we had for dinner for my 40th birthday when Mum gave me a ring with a ruby (my July birthstone) surrounded by diamonds. I’ve been wearing it a long time – in fact, needed to get the gold reinforced as it had worn thin.

I was interested to read in Sue Monk Kidd’s book, Writing Creativity and Soul, that she keeps a little box or some sort of container on her desk that holds an assortment of small symbolic objects related to the story she’s writing. She collected objects in a small mother-of-pearl box in the shape of a heart when she was writing The Dance of the Dissident Daughter. The box of symbols helped when her fingers would pause over the keys “and I would think, I can’t write that, and then glancing at the little box, I would write it anyway.”

“When an object is imbued with strong, personal meaning, it functions. In this case, the items in my Dissident Daughter box conjured up the presence and power of the experiences I was writing about. They became meaningful, impactful, and active all over again . . . “

Sue goes on to say: “Little boxes hold the potency, feeling, and distilled meaning of my work. They elicit a sense of connection to the material that helps sustain me for the long hall.”

Orhan Pamuk created a whole museum of objects related to his own youth, growing up in Istanbul, and the fictional characters in his novel The Museum of Innocence. His book, The Innocence of Objects, takes readers on a tour of the museum, The Museum of Innocence, Istanbul, which features everyday objects: “the ephemera, bric-a-brac, and clutter that adheres to every life.” The objects are “intimately tied: to The Museum of Innocence, Pamuk’s novel of lost love “which lends its narrative structure to their arrangement in the museum.”

If you can’t make it to Istanbul, I highly recommend the book about the collection!

All of this is part of the musing I’ve been doing about a tactile approach to storytelling and it goes back to cutting out images of models and household objects and furnishings from an Eaton’s catalogue. My friend Angie did that too and we also played with paper dolls to imagine and create scenarios and ideal family stories.

Using our imaginations, that’s what key to our enjoyment as well as keeping our cognitive abilities alive.

Beth Robinson in a book written by Merilyn Simonds called Walking with Beth: Conversations with My 100-Year-Old Friend says: “We all need solitary time; we all need to take care of ourselves physically and emotionally. And we all need a passion that is our own. How can we navigate a journey that pushes and pulls at us as hard as life does, unless we can imagine.”

I was interested to read that Beth Robinson constructs collages on her dining room table and will move one to a little table by her  armchair “where it stays until a new idea, another urge, moves her. Then she sets the collage on the floor, photographs it, and dismantles it, returning the materials to her dining table to become something new.”

Going back further in time (than the paper dolls in my own history), there were the flannel boards of Sunday school in which biblical characters, backed in flannel, were placed on the board, and moved around by the teacher to tell a story. A tactile approach to storytelling for sure.

When I say tactile I mean our hands as well as our minds are involved.

Apparently, it was the use of the hands that developed the brain. The copy of the book, The Hand by Frank R. Wilson first published in 1998, was purchased at Britnell’s Bookshop in Toronto. I don’t know if that was the year I bought the book but I haven’t lived in Toronto since 1999. That lets me know I’ve had the book a long time and my interest in the use of our hands as puppeteers, jugglers, musicians, writers, artists and creators of all sorts has gone on for decades.

Frank R. Wilson, a neurologist, writes: “Early this morning, even before you were out of bed, your hands and arms came to life, goading your weak and helpless body into the new day.” There’s more use of our hands to get the day moving with “objects to be opened or closed, lifted or pushed, twisted or turned, pulled, twiddled, or tied, and some sort of breakfast to be peeled or unwrapped, toasted, brewed, boiled, or fried . . . Whatever your own particular early-morning routine happens to be, it is nothing short of a virtuoso display of highly choreographed manual skill.”

One of the researchers Wilson quotes is Sherwood Washburn, an anthropologist, who “quite specifically insisted that the modern human brain came into being after the hominid hand became ‘handier’ with tools, maintaining that the brain was the last organ to evolve. It is a daring idea, one which requires us to look very closely at the evolutionary background of this hand, and the changes that brought it its present anatomic configuration and functional capabilities.”

The use of our hands has shaped our development and I can’t help but think that the use of our hands aids our imaginations, the stories we tell, as well as helps us through the practical and magical of every day.

“What we do with our hands has immediate effect on our emotions and sense of self, and evokes deep aspirations and ancestral motifs,” Thomas Moore says in “The Presence of the Hand” in his book The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life. He was talking about creating things with our hands and yet I think as I arrange some items on the corner of my desk, I’m telling a story of what’s beautiful to me, what’s important, and what prompts my memory as well as my imagination.

’ll be writing more about a tactile approach to storytelling, whether memoir, poetry, or fiction. Stay tuned!

The word “discipline” is often mentioned when it comes to describing a writing practice. I prefer the word “devotion.”

“Our methodology is not as important as our devotion,” Betsy Warland says in Breathing the Page: Reading the Act of Writing.

My writing practice, to which I am devoted, includes reading, attending workshops and retreats, meeting with other writers, writing, and imagining in all sorts of different forms.

Laraine Herring who wrote On Being Stuck: Tapping into the Creative Power of Writer’s Block, makes note of devotion as well: “If you choose writing as one of your acts of devotion, prepare to be a student of its wisdom as long as you show up for its gifts. Writing will put you forward into places you can’t yet see. It will bring with it the challenges you need to become more fully alive and awake. It will bring with it the obstacles you need to grow.”

Recently, while on a silent retreat at home, I realized that time is important for writing (there’s never enough) as well as desire. Sometimes the desire doesn’t manifest into words on the page. It can mean ideas floating in the head. Quiet time is ideal for that sort of imagining and the forming of seeds that aren’t quite ready to blossom.

That’s just right for people who are “makers” as opposed to “producers.” We makers don’t have the need to always produce a physical product. Writing is so much about the process. Is this a book or is this an ongoing process, I asked myself recently.

“Makers” and “producers” are described in Making Time: A New Vision for Crafting a Life Beyond Productivity by Maria Bowler. In my own mind, I think about makers in terms of intentions and producers in terms of goals. An intention is something to stretch towards, enjoying the process along the way, without an end product necessarily in mind. A goal means the future is the focus so that your current practice is all about the future rather than the present.

“Ironically, by being in touch with and acting from your true intentions, you become more effective in reaching your goals than when you act from wants and insecurities.,” says Phillip Moffitt in a Dharma Wisdom article available online called “The Heart’s Intention.”

Maria Bowler has a chapter on “Making Delight.” She says: “When you allow yourself to delight in something, you are open to being charmed by it. Unexpectedly and pleasantly transformed by it.”

Rather than a product to be monetized, or task to be accomplished, delight is part of your nature says Bowler. In writing The Book of Delights, poet and essayist Ross Gay discovered that “the more you study delight, the more delight there is to study.”

Gathering with other writers is a delight, observing what is discovered. Also, using our imaginations is good medicine for our times and brings great delight. “You have the capacity to make worlds in your mind,” Maria Bowler says. I delight in the way we can re-envision the ways things were and the way we would like them to be.

It’s a delight to read a poem called “Blueberries” by my poet friend Barbara Pelman who used four lines from a poem, also called “Blueberries,” by our mutual poet friend Laura Apol for her glosa. It’s a delight to write and see what’s revealed on the page which can be surprising at times. That happens a lot in the women’s writing circles I facilitate. Maybe you’d like to join us in June for some devotion and delight?

For five mornings in June (Pacific time), I’ll be facilitating a women’s writing circle on Zoom called “Devotion & Delight: Honouring Your Writing Practice.”

“Honour” – there’s another word to describe the writing life you want to nourish. The dates for the “Devotion and Delight” circle are June 15 to 19, 2026 – five consecutive days – 10 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. Pacific time.

If you’re working on a writing project and would like to keep up the momentum with some writing companions nearby or would like to establish and maintain a writing practice, this writing circle is for you.

Here’s a link to further information: Devotion & Delight.

“Welcome to Russell Books: an indie bookstore on an island in the Pacific Ocean, where anemones dispense life advice and staff recommend books to mollusks,” reads Guernica Editions’ description of Zoe Dickinson’s debut book of poetry: Staff Picks for Invertebrates.

“Zoe’s poetry is rooted in British Columbia’s Pacific coastline with a focus on local ecology,” as her bio reads. She’s a manager at Russell Books in Victoria and from 2020 to 2023, was Artistic Director of Planet Earth Poetry Reading Series. She continues to volunteer as a board member and you can see her on Friday nights at PEP, hosted by Russell Books, making sure readers and audience members are comfortable as they gather to listen to poetry.

Zoe’s chapbooks Public Transit (Leaf Press, 2015) and intertidal: poems from the littoral zone (Raven Chapbooks, 2022), were both award winners.

In my blog review of intertidal I said: “This is a poet we can trust with her astute observations, knowledge, and a reciprocal relationship with what surrounds her.” Zoe considers the creatures she has come to know in the ecology of Vancouver Island, her “more-than-human neighbours.”

Intertidal as well as Zoe’s new book, Staff Picks, begins with “I’d like to start by acknowledging that this poem is being / written” followed by:

on the unceded territories of the lək̓ʷəŋən speaking peoples:
the Songhees and Esquimalt nations.

The poem also acknowledges that

.. . . . my life takes place
where someone else’s life could be happening
                   that where my apartment building sits,
                   someone should be gathering camas bulbs
                   but instead, not far away, she is boiling water
                   before mixing her baby’s formula.”

The term “camas bulbs” carries a lot of weight and story. The Beacon Hill area of Victoria was one of the most productive camas territories on Vancouver Island where the lək̓ʷəŋən harvested camas bulbs for food and trading. White settlers altered that traditional practice when their cattle grazed the tops of the camas plants and pigs rooted up the bulbs. Acres of camas fields were planted with other crops such as oats, wheat, and potatoes. Houses would follow and apartment buildings as Zoe notes in her poem.

As for “staff picks,” you’ve probably seen the denotation on shelves at libraries and bookstores. In Zoe’s case, the book’s title poem has suggestions for invertebrates. Among them are the hermit crab, sea urchin, acorn barnacle, and nudibranch, a sea slug known for its spectacular colours and shapes.

For the oyster, The Creative Act by Rick Ruben is recommended as

Rick understands this essential
truth about pearls  
and poetry:  
what we create will coalesce  
around the things we need to heal,  
or conceal.

The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, is suggested for the giant pacific octopus.

. . . I think you’d like
Emily – how she retreated to her den
and doled out words,
each poem’s coiled complexity
delicious as a prawn’s tail.

You can see by the book’s cover design by Rafael Chimicatti, and the poems inside, that Zoe Dickinson’s bookstore is no ordinary indie bookstore. As she writes in “what it is”:

The bookstore has roots
with mycelial networks
as complex and responsive
as neurons in the brain –

The store isn’t all magic as there are customers of the human kind that make for “fragile places” as one poem describes. “Some vandal throws a garbage can / against the store window,” and burglars break in through the loading bay, emptying locked cases of rare tomes including a signed copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.

And there is “the shoplifter” wearing “the same red velvet tracksuit” and the customer who hasn’t bathed in a year and a half, he says, and smiles in “how to wake up.” There are those who call with strange questions that they could Google on their own such as described in “customer service.” And there’s the kid who rubs his saliva-coated palms on the “escalator’s smooth / rubber handrail.” The title of that poem: “dumbstruck.”

The escalator in Russell’s is a significant presence and is turned off for poetry readings. Described as “the captive god,” it gets its own poem in Staff Picks: “the escalator.” While the escalator “browses our romance section” after dark, the poem’s speaker can’t help but think of being at the edge of a cliff and imagining falling off “in grisly detail.”

You can’t imagine what is contained in the used books brought in to “the book trade counter.”

Each book tells two stories:
what’s written on the page,
and what happened to the page

The unexpected items found in used books include:

wedding photos, grocery lists, fall leaves,
a blade of grass  
a strand of cooked spaghetti  
a sewing needle

and once
a newborn’s hospital record,
the baby’s footprint achingly perfect
in crisp blue ink

Wow, Zoe saved the most poignant one until the end.

We book lovers love bookstores and I love the way Zoe describes hers in “it is not your friend.”

The bookstore is not anyone’s home
but at dusk, its windows
are the same shade of yellow
as the kitchen window in the house
                  where you grew up

And to close her tribute to the bookstore:

It is not your friend
but it will introduce you to the love
                          of your life.

That “love of your life” could be a book, definitely, or could be someone browsing in the same aisle.

If it’s “chicks” you’re looking for, there are sections to avoid as advised in “where not to pick up chicks at a bookstore.” One of them is

Romance

Is a lot to live up to
don’t approach
unless you can promise
happily ever after

You’ll learn new terms in Staff Picks (like “fuzzy onchidoris” in the poem titled “nudibranch” and “tapestry of hyphae” in “lichen” and if you don’t understand them, don’t call Russell Books – unless you’re looking for a book about invertebrates or Zoe’s book of course. You could join the Field Naturalists as Zoe has or engage the help of Marine Detective Jackie Hildering.

One of Zoe’s gorgeous poems is “aubade” which is a form either welcoming or mourning the arrival of dawn. I’ll leave you with another piece of writing by Zoe, this one from Facebook, about the night sky and the bookstore she loves:

Locking up after @planetearthpoetry tonight… Russell Books glowing in the dark. I’m listening to an advance reading copy of Suzanne Simard’s new book, When the Forest Breathes, and she of course is all about the complex web of symbiotic relationships happening under the forest soil, in which different species nourish each other. Anyway Russell’s is like that, a bit. A seemingly homogeneous pile of stuff (i.e. a metric crapton of books) that is more complex the deeper you look, almost fractal in its depth of detail, and that improbably supports an amazing variety of life.

,

It’s been ten years since I had cancer which makes it time to celebrate that milestone of Ten Years Cancer Free!

Following a biopsy on my shin which revealed that the lump was spindle cell sarcoma, my GP in Nanaimo told me there would probably be some treatment and surgery. That didn’t sound too bad.

Then Sarah and I went to meet the orthopaedic sursgeon at the BC Cancer Agency in Vancouver.

Ravenous

Because the surgeon bears an impish grin
and pulls himself closer to me on a wheel-less
stool – he looks me straight in the eye
long enough to know he sees me –
and because he wears a mauve shirt with
co-ordinating tie, directs my gaze to a wall
calendar and says,
This will all be over in five months,
I accept his prescription:
five weeks of radiation,
six weeks of rest,
surgery in November.

We leave the office, walk slowly to the car.
Let’s just go home, Sarah says.

Because our home is across the Salish Sea,
we drive, silent, to the ferry. In the line-up,
Sarah goes for take-out fish and chips.
When they arrive, I eat them. Ravenous.

Five weeks of radiation on my left shin sounded ominous but it all worked out. I stayed at the Cancer Society Lodge near Royal Jubilee Hospital and the BC Cancer Society in Victoria where I had the treatments. The radiation technologists were friendly and efficient. Radiation isn’t painful; I just had a red burn on my left leg. That didn’t stop me from exploring Victoria where I’d walk in a different direction every day.

Twenty-Five Days

Every day after breakfast,
not always the same time,
I sign myself out at the front desk
of the lodge where out-of-town
cancer patients stay. Walk
down the steps, turn the corner
onto Richmond –
always
on the same side so I can
pause at the house with Buddha
in the garden – then pass the bus stop
where no one makes eye contact.
Inside the clinic, after the café and
the gift shop, I head downstairs.
A man stops when I come near, says
it’s bad luck to pass on the stairs,
presses his body against the wall and,
gives me a nod. I know where I’m
going. Through the waiting area,
peach and lime-covered chairs,
down the hall of donated paintings.
I put my white card in the tray
that says Fir. Sometimes I don’t
wait at all. When they’re ready
for me, I take off my shoes and
socks, roll up my left pant leg.
Hannah says, “Good morning
sunshine.” I shimmy into position
on the table. “Two to the right”
an RT says as they line up the
machine, place a pink bolus
on my shin. Hannah covers me
with a warm blanket. I don’t
remember the name
of the 6-million-dollar machine
even though I’ve stared up at it
twenty-five times. I close my eyes,
see my dead mum and dad doing what
they can to say everything will be all right.

My mother had died in 1995 and my father in 2014, a year before the radiation treatments. His wife Jean told me that if he had found out I had cancer, it would have killed him. Both my parents died of cancer affecting the lungs. Mine was different and didn’t end my life.
Staying at the Cancer Society Lodge was a cozy home base during the week when I was in Victoria. On the weekends, I’d return home to Nanaimo via Wheels for Wellness, vans driven by volunteers.

This next poem begins with an epigraph:

My own life hovers, newly emerged,
alert as to who I will become upon leaving this place.

                                                                                        Melissa Pritchard

At the Lodge

At the table in the lodge dining room, Brenda says
she wants to have a party on Thursday as we all
leave Friday for a weekend home. She’s found
some old sheet music by the piano, hopes to get
the karaoke machine working.

Brenda is close to the end of treatment. Her meal
choices: vegetables with béchamel sauce, sometimes
a smoothie, and on the way home in the Wheels for
Wellness van, her favourite: a Tim Horton’s frappuccino.

I’m new to the place and the diagnosis, curious
about Brenda’s need to celebrate and about the way
the women choose to talk about their prognosis.

Every hair of her wig in place, every rhinestone
perfect on her jewelry, Fay tells us what’s she’s afraid of.
Hilary says: Let’s not go there.

There’s someone new in the corner – a man
in a freshly ironed shirt, tray full of dinner,
in front of him. His neck gags when he lifts the fork.
Sometimes, he leaves the table to return and try again,
head bowed.

One of us goes for the nurse who crouches down
beside the man’s chair, removes the tray, says, it’s all right
as the man murmurs: I didn’t want to waste the food.

Is it better to toss the wigs and rhinestones?
Who will continue to be upon leaving this place?

I wonder how the other patients are doing now? Are they continuing to be, that is, to live?

Dr. Paul Clarkson, who told me “this will all be over in five months” wasn’t quite accurate. There was still surgery scheduled for December. (The radiation treatments took place in August – September.) Then the surgery was cancelled when I was all prepped at Vancouver General, the doctors having signed my left leg including the plastic surgeon who would be doing the skin graft.

When I went back in January 2016, I had the same orthopaedic surgeon as he’s a specialist when it comes to spindle cell sarcoma; the anesthesiologist and plastic surgeon had changed. The cancerous lump and margins were removed and I recovered for ten days or so at VGH. A hospital is a noisy place to try and recover but I did get the best care and visits from my son Andy which was the best gift of all.

Back at home, Sarah wore about seven hats as she became doctor, nurse, physiotherapist, occupational therapist, driver, head cook and bottle washer. Imagine taking on the challenge of changing the dressing on a skin graft, a very delicate procedure. She did it! Some of the driving involved ten trips by BC Ferry to Dr. Mark Hill at Vancouver General for check-ups on the skin graft. Those were the days of “thinking pink” as that was the result that indicated healing. 

Something we weren’t told in advance was that I couldn’t walk on my left leg for a couple of months due to the skin graft. That was indeed a challenge but I did get walking again with the help of a physiotherapist, graduating from crutches and wheelchair to walker and then cane.

Recently I was in Victoria in the Oak Bay area which was one of my haunts ten years ago as it’s close to the BC Cancer Agency and the Cancer Society Lodge. Driving through the neighbourhood, I saw the various coffee shops I visited and restaurants where I had lunch.

I had a desire to go and see if Hannah still worked as a radiation technician and if she was still knitting.

Thank you to Derek Hanebury, host and MC of Electric Mermaid “live reads” for inviting me to be the feature reader on Wednesday, February 25, 2026 at 6 p.m. Pacific. If you’re in Port Alberni, B.C., Char’s Landing at 4815 Argyle Street is the place to go. Otherwise, you can Zoom in to hear the open mic readers that will begin the readings, followed by me reading poems, old and new. Here’s a link to the Char’s Landing website for the Zoom link. Look under “Events.”

The “hybrid” reading event will be recorded so if you can’t attend on the date, it will be on the Char’s Landing You Tube channel following the readings.

And how about writing some poems of your own?

Several years ago (more than twenty), I offered poetry circles called “Just Like Making Soup.” I figured that writing a poem is like following a well-loved recipe. There are guidelines to follow, to which we can add our own special additions, flavours, and surprises to make that soup or poem our own.

While you’re standing at the stove stirring the soup or sitting at the table writing the poem, you are in the moment while memories of having eaten that soup before, with loved ones, arrive like gifts on the page.

One of the “Just Like Making Soup” circles was at Eramosa Eden, a retreat centre on the Eramosa River in Rockwood, Ontario. In more recent years, I’ve been leading writing circles at Bethlehem Centre on Westwood Lake in Nanaimo, B.C. A new one in the works is “Bringing Poems to Life,” a one-day writing circle, on Saturday, March 21, World Poetry Day, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.. We’ll gather to celebrate and discover the many gifts of poetry.

“Bringing poems to life” is to craft new poems as inspired by a memory, an image, someone else’s poem. And the phrase can also mean bringing poems by others into our life so as to appreciate those illuminations of all aspects of life.

“I don’t know if I breathed the poem or the poem breathed me,” Natalie Goldberg writes in “How Poetry Saved My Life,” the opening essay in Top of My Lungs (The Overlook Press, 2002).

Reading French philosopher, Gaston Bachelard, helped me to define poetry for myself.

Poetry is the soul creating a ceremony out of an ordinary event.

Whether you are new to the practice or a seasoned poet, reading and writing poetry is a praise practice that can illuminate the sacred in the ordinary. Poems can contain small fictions, arrive as gifts, be surprisingly prescient at times, honour a person, place or event, and always serves as your own way of embracing the richness of life.

I invite you to join me on World Poetry Day, Saturday, March 21, 2026, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Bethlehem Centre in Nanaimo.
Here’s the link to a description and to register: Bethlehem Centre. 

I’ve been leading writing circles since 1997 as well as all-day circles and retreats. The writing circles offer a place for voices to be heard. We create a sacred container together with some guidelines so voices, stories and poems can be honoured.

At Bethlehem Centre, we’ll have an opportunity to walk the beautiful grounds for some further contemplation and enjoy some social time at a nourishing lunch prepared for us.

I look forward to these opportunities to share and to write poetry. I hope you can join me!

If my dear old dad was still alive, I would have given him a call on the weekend to tell him The Northlander is back. As Taras Grescoe wrote in his Saturday Globe and Mail opinion piece: “For the first time in 14 years, a passenger train headed for the eastern shores of Ontario’s Lake Nipissing and points north will roll out of Union Station.”

When the inaugural run takes place some time this year, The Northlander will take passengers eight hours and 40 minutes if they travel all the way from Toronto’s Union Station to Timmins where there’s a newly built station. The train service between Toronto and Timmins ended in 2012, two years before my father died. The train will again link the Great Lakes to James Bay. He’d be pleased I think.

“In 1964, the northern part of the line began to cater to tourists with the launch of the Polar Bear Express excursion train, which still runs between Cochrane and Moosonee,” the Globe article says.

I have my own memories of the Polar Bear express as Dad, Bob Moore, worked for the Ontario Northland from the time he was a teenager until he ended up working in public relations for the company before retiring to British Columbia.

Ghost Stories

The train will leave Union Station and go North to
where I’ll see my father who will engineer the
Ontario Northland from Cochrane, the Polar Bear
Express. I’ll visit his home where a woman called
Alice shares his bed.

He will never marry Alice – he’ll wait for Audrey,
citified and proper, a homophobe, which won’t
be apparent to me until some years later.

We pass Moose River Crossing where my father
grew up with eleven siblings though there were more –
a son born to his father’s lover the same year
I was born. Three others after my grandmother died.

In Moosonee, the Anglican chapel has prayer books
in Cree. It will be decades before I go west to Lytton
to learn more about my great uncle, an Anglican
priest, once principal of an Indian Residential School.

On the way south and home, a dining car with white
tablecloths and silver coffee urns. The daily newspaper
available if we want – my own news, I decide at seventeen
not to live with my mother and her third husband.

The thing is, I never attended my parents’ multiple nuptials,
never thought about the train as time, the standing
still of it, the future, the past of it, a porter with white gloves.
A woman saying my dad was on his best behaviour when I came to visit.

The “lover” I refer to was Elizabeth who became my grandfather Ernie’s second wife after my grandmother Nora May died in 1961. Ernie and Elizabeth had three more children together.

Would Dad and I have talked about that situation? There would probably have been some reference to it but mostly he would recall his days working for the Ontario Northland.

Some of what I learned about Dad’s railroad career was from an interview he did with Murray McLauchlan for Murray’s song “Railroad Man” released in 1984.

Dad read my poem “Railroad Man,” a pantoum I wrote, included in my collection Fishing for Mermaids (Leaf Press, 2014). I had written about him sanding the walks at the North Bay engine roundhouse with a repeated line from Murray’s song: “I started with a shovel. I started with a dream.”

After the war, Dad was given a wheelbarrow for his work before progressing on to becoming a fireman and then engineer.

I was a fireman before I became an engineer.
Mother waved a tea towel as the train passed through.
I’d blow the whistle from two miles back.
Everyone knew that Bob Moore was coming into town.

And another poem for Dad, Bob Moore (June 9, 1926 – October 19, 2014), with thanks to Billy Collins who wrote “Litany.”

Happy Hour

You are the engine steaming north,
the soapstone walrus with his tusks,
the tamped-down pipe,
the fishing fly.
You are happy hour at four.

You are not the hand-written letter,
the game of solitaire.

It is possible you are the wooden birdhouse,
the last rose of summer,
but you are not even close
to being an island,
a fir tree,
moss on craggy rocks.

It will interest you to know,
I am the camellia rooted up,
the shiny bits a crow collects.
I am a poem freshly made.

But don’t worry, I’m not the engine steaming north.
You will always be the engine steaming north,
the whistle blowing,
not to mention the pipe
and somehow, happy hour at four.