chronotope

{old picture. aspen poplars last september up near oldman creek, whitecourt}

a poem that is still a bit unformed. work-in-progress, yes.

chronotope.

the chronotope expresses the indivisibility, the insolubility of space and time.—m. bakhtin.

back in suburbia the landscape can shift so quickly – turn your back for an afternoon,
cat-nap in the shade, work the back garden & turn around to find the horizon empty,
your grove of trees cut down in a day –

leaves all over the sidewalk strewn, dust in the air. in my twenty years
i never thought the sky would change. now i’m walking along streets there,
small shoots of grass blossoming in gaps & cracks of an asphalt mask
that tries to cover this uprooted memory –

but there’s a layer surfacing;
a small child still running there, sticks in her hand bent into a shoddy bow & willow arrows, artemis braided in her woods whipping around in the hot breeze & her skinned knees pedalling a pink bicycle, coasting down dirt-hills after her father who names the plants:

the heart-shaped shepherd’s purse, wild aster wild rose, sprig of pennycress
scottish thistle, stinging nettles, in the canola caragana canarygrass

the aspen stumps now with their sawdust smell in the soft rain, soft mud that sinks
through the strata of my cerebrum. i walk here & i can still see them stretched there, etched there like branches twisting lungs on the blue sky, above the scars of driveways, billboards, fast cars & golf carts something is remembering –

because there’s a layer surfacing
with a young girl watching the trees sway from her window, summer thunderstorms coming & going with sweet peppermint relief & she is running through the yellow stubble, through a whistling tornado of crows:

then in the winter grosbeaks, magpies, chickadees & flocks of crying waxwings
& in the springtime with robins, blue jays, hummingbirds then autumnal siskins

because we’ve dropped feathers on this land. those crows passing over, cloud shadows mark
our transience, the taste of rain & earth, the empty forest now, hallowed hollow
on the land that’s never noticed, land they thought they could forget, negate, erase
if they built enough houses, construction signs of false privilege in a place

that will never disappear – for there are still layers alive beneath my feet
where poplar roots sprout swift to grow & sigh under wind & arch their backs, buckling pavement stretching persistent to crack cobblestones & fracture cement basements & i will lie there pick pineapple-weed from the cracks that break our mother’s back

lie there with my heartbeat echoing into the dirt & i will remember my own body
like a living stratigraphy

of this place where i lived with its waxwings & thistles & magpies & poplar seeds

& deep, deeper to the buffalo bones beneath me, before me the tipi rings & pow-wow sings
now a crow complaining so loudly from the mansion spire above, feathers floating
to here where my whole body carries the memory