VALOIS BAY, PQ

Bare Feet and Animal Bones

You could walk on lodestones in your bare feet, or on animal bones grubbed white in the blistering July sun, or on fence-wire scrolled like snakeskin after a hard summer rain, or on beer

bottle caps and fliptops left by drifters, mute wives, and FAS children, heads caulked with deerflies and lice, or on a gravel road marrow with feldspar and potash, or on cob tacking and

railheads rusted into warps of keel wood, you could not however, walk on water, or shrug off the pain or remember a time when life was less complicated and troubling or at least less sad

Battleship Wood and Nails

Do you remember the fort we built between the house and the garage made with battleship wood and straightened nails, and the hinge for the trapdoor we pilfered from the neighbors

garden shed, always catching on a burl of roof tile, the tile we lifted from the back of the construction man’s truck when he was drinking a Coke and drawing down hard on a Mark Ten,

if I remember, Riders In The Storm was playing, and we shared a cigarette I’d stolen from my dad, and those gray baby rabbits like plant bulbs my father etherized in a shoebox full of holes,

then chucked in the garbage at the foot of the driveway, and do you remember when it first

happened, when your thoughts went haywire and the voices started, and when you couldn’t

remember me visiting, or the fort we built between the house and the garage with battleship wood and nails