Free Runaway Dreams by Richard Wagamese Page B

intrudes
    from the east
    to show the deer
    watching you from the trees
    at the end of the driveway
    the smoke of her breath
    joined to the fog
    leaving
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    no one ever pulled up
    to heaven with a U-Haul
    someone told you that once
    and if you laughed about it then
    here you come to understand
    the utter sense of it
    that this mosaic of things
    the bits and pieces
    of this life that move
    you so
    are what you carry with you
    when you go
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    spirit lives in everything
    there are no departures
    only another joining

West Arm Kootenay Lake
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    There’s a wind from the southeast pushing
    waves up to the edge of the beach
    where you can see the full moon hanging
    behind a bank of clouds set between
    the humped shoulders of mountains
    everything is indigo now
    even the shadows have retreated to purple
    as the silvered mercury of the moon
    puts a sheen on the body of the lake
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    if you look long enough the motion
    of the water makes it look as though
    the moon were moving, drifting further
    away across the depths of space
    with the planet giving chase until
    you come to feel yourself move
    so you spread your arms and close
    your eyes to feel the tractive tug of it
    calling you forward outward beyond
    all sense of where you are until
    a part of you becomes moonbeam, star
    dust, nebula and the tail of a comet maybe
    and you laugh to feel that
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    it’s not very Indian you say
    to let yourself escape like this
    to wander out across the universe
    when all your issues are here on the planet
    land claims, treaty rights, the clamour for a
    place at the negotiating table on things
    that affect us and dammit all Wagamese
    there’s people starving in Pikangikum
    and eighteen people share a two-room house
    without a proper toilet in Atawapiskat
    and there’s kids surrendering to gang life
    glue and solvents and their parents
    are drunk and can’t give a damn
    because the chief ran off with a few
    hundred grand of the fiscal funding
    in the new pickup truck he bought
    his nephew’s vote with who won’t need
    it until he gets out of jail anyway
    and there’s no one watching out
    for shit like that even though it happens
    everywhere and the people pay the price
    as in the suicide rate that still hangs high
    above the national average
    (though why they even have a stat for that
    boggles you at the best of times)
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    when you open your eyes there’s
    nothing before you but the land
    and in its absolute stillness
    there’s the sound of wind on water
    and as you push to hear it you discover
    that you have to really want to
    it doesn’t just come to you
    you have to crave it, yearn for it
    ache for the luxuriant whisper that says
    harmony happens on its own here
    when you come to believe that it fills you
    and you become beach and wave and lake
    and mountains humped against the semi-dark
    and a moon that sails across the sky like hope
    another thing you have to really want
    in order for it to happen
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    in the end it’s as Indian as it gets
    this reaching out to feel connected to imagine
    becoming a part of things displaced
    from you by issues and bothers and hurt
    the Old Ones say that harmony and separation
    cannot occur in the same time and place
    and maybe that’s it
    this whole native issues thing
    that you ultimately become
    what you believe in most
    even a planet chasing a moon
    across time and space

September Breaks — Paul Lake
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    The lake exhales a jubilant mist that carries
    within it the desperate calls of loons
    making preparations to wing south
    and there’s a bear ambled down
    to drink and eye the yards hewn
    from mountainside lush with blackberry
    late season saskatoons and the trashcan
    someone left the lid ajar upon
    as an eagle cuts a slice out of the sky
    then gives way to the osprey clan
    hungry for trout and the muskrat who
    claimed a home beneath your friend’s dock
    noses an expanding vee into the