as wind driven flax. The orange pallor, pale with liquid swoon and ability to churn itself about the night sky or flood in endless beams our poorer spectacle below.  [19] 

 

FOR TOM THOMSON

I have thrust my fists up to ice in the galactic mire of lake, lured my minnow wriggler eyes as bait to ensnare inroads, lake bed wreaths, across the windchill spine of brooding heart. I am on the essence of the North where latitudes of cold spontaneity remind me the nameless lakes part not easily with their secrets. A man's bones go easily to rot in the frigid perspiration called primeval ooze, precambrian sweat, the tertiary stage syphilitic crawl of advancing ice. All those terms your detractors, analyzers, devotees coin to define you: the Boreal, taiga, subarctic steppes, white hell, recoil under the onslaught, the lustrate message straining up alkaline clear. Water is your blood. A vast hoarding, most of this planet's fresh drink is flushed through your bowels, with kidneys separating the renic qualities as snow and sleet, the night side of your character. Tom, son of Thomson fame, his little canoe immeshed as scrubbed floorboards now, a giant winnowing such scattered firewood over a slow crop of putrefying muck; perhaps I see your eyes as sturdy bubbles popping from legions of green liquid to carouse with your firm memory.  [21] 

 

THE WOODSMAN

Barely annoying the woods, his cabin like our woodpile home now for chipmunks and birds, isolated by the lily pads - he eschewed all comfort. The view barely cognizant, the prospect of the Massasauga rattler and an occasional broken tin sharp at the edges was like water's drift audible, not yet seen. Toying with the cove, past island jetties & blueberry groves inside little giant's tomb; this man became ingratiated with lake treasure, his clearing a triumphant blast. He affixed his mark - blazoning human habitation on a lonely spot.  [23] 

 

EAST OF OSWEGOE

Ticonderoga to Lake George, the classic invasion route up the Richelieu valley past Plattsburg, Verdun, à Montréal across the North Shore reroute again to savour Albany; last of the trading posts east of Oswego before New York protective sanctuary lodgings, free from the scalping knife barrens and the horrors Fenimore Cooper described. Apple crisp, fall damp the air with an unbroken stretch of forest and Adirondack mountains, 

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