Free Runaway Dreams by Richard Wagamese Page A

waters, breathless for the tale
    born by echo. There’s a lifetime in these boxes, and in their
    faded inks and snapshots running to opaque your father’s
    world fills itself in hint by hint, line by line, detail by detail,
    until finally, as the boxes disappear you assemble a keepsake,
    a shrine they so inelegantly call a “scrap” book — the only
    treasure you can take away. They are the sum of us the things
    we keep and in the hands of loved ones once we’re gone,
    those paper trails of living retain their sense of self, sit there
    squarely in the palm, crooning old jazz ballads, moaning a
    particular blues, singing their histories.

Getting Supper
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    there’s nothing too traditional
    about a tuna steak fashioned
    into burgers to someone
    with sturgeon as a totem
    but you could make the case
    that wasabi is an Ojibway word
    if you said it slow enough
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    still I’ve learned to brandish a knife
    and I can mince without too much
    damage to my manliness
    and now that I know there’s things to skin
    I can retain a savage decorum
    even if it’s just an onion
    and I face the whole
    slice and dice thing
    like a cavalry charge
    over a battlefield of lettuce
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    but there’s something elemental in
    the hunkering over a stove or a grill
    that hearkens back to fires
    glowing orange in the night
    and the smell of meat roasting on a stick
    so that this whole getting supper thing
    has its merits in a purely
    cross-cultural way
    even if I flunk the miso tuna burger test
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    the hunter prowls Safeway aisles now
    the gatherer chases bargains
    in the produce section and hey
    shiitake is a ceremonial word you know
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    honest

Monk at Midnight
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    They say he learned to play by ear and that by the time he
    made it to Minton’s he was shellacking the keys with his whole
    body as though the fingers splayed in gigantic stretches were
    extensions of the spirit he pushed across the room, over the
    tables, up to the rafters and down again to explode in the
    souls of the ones lucky enough to hear him then. He was a
    bear of a man, a grizzled veteran of the road, so that when he
    laid down a note it meant more than the timbre of it against
    the night, the room, the crowd, it meant a thousand nights
    walking alone through darkened streets with shards of sound
    borne down from streetlamps, up from the desolate alleys and
    sluiced down the gutters and out to the black current of the
    river to the sea where jazz is born in the tempest of things
    and the toss and tide of fate made manifest in cigar smoke
    and whiskey and seven octaves alive in the hands of a genius
    who brooked no falsehood in notes or life. Monk played with
    his whole body. You could hear that. He played every note in
    sheer amazement of the one he’d played before. So that the
    cascade of runs made that keyboard sound eighteen feet long
    and standing looking out from the window at the shadow of
    the mountains in the darkness, Monk, dead as hell for almost
    thirty years, reaches out behind you and fills the corners of
    the room with sound. Awesome, you think to be touched this
    way and jazz becomes an Ojibway thing by virtue of the blues
    built into it and the feeling of the moan of a song caught in
    the throat and begging release to the land where all things
    are born and all things return in the end and the belief we
    hold that it can save us, the song spilled out upon the land.
    Jazz and soul and hope and harmony and all things Ojibway
    becoming one at once, everything alternating a semitone
    apart, until the last note fades and you stand there in your
    lack, waiting . . .

Paul Lake Fog
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    Great beards of air
    moving slow
    stretching as if tugged
    by a child’s hands
    introducing trees
    limb by limb
    and crows placed
    neatly along the power line
    like a string of beads
    hung around the neck
    of the mountain
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    nothing but the air moves
    until the sun