St. Andrews JHS, 1990 – Fall
Because the room is not a room
but a phone call,
the principal at my school
has concerns,
ran a background check
and turned up reports
from a camp where Don worked
ten years before,
alleging impropriety with
children, mostly minors
from broken homes — retribution,
Don said later,
for his complaints that the kids
weren’t being fed enough,
weren’t given clean clothes
(You know me, he said,
I’m always fighting for the interests
of our youngest citizens);
because Don is my father’s best
friend, and mine, too;
because school sucks;
because Don doesn’t ask
for more than the cost of my keep
to homeschool me;
because I’ve already been in his care,
and deny everything
when my father quizzes me
about his behaviour,
asks if Don has ever touched me
down there; because I beg
to go; because Don’s cabin is quiet,
and we can read Plato
and track animals through the forest;
because he likes me,
which is really nice of him;
because of history,
which goes back forever
between friends; because
even when I ask him about it
later, say, Don, do you
do this to the others, too? he looks
shocked and says
No, no, there’s only you, Oh god,
there’s only you;
Maritime Bus, 1990 – Fall
Because the room is a window
seat on a bus grinding
against snow and blowing winds
up the 401
to Cape Breton Island where Don
is waiting to pick me up;
because the causeway is piled
with ice and buried cars;
because there’s music playing,
a tinny AM radio tuned
in to a Nashville hit, which fades
in and out of the static;
because the wind outside throws
its own static across
the road in sheets so thick
the bus is forced to crawl,
stop, threaten not to make it,
which would mean going back
to my father, who will say, I’m sorry,
you can’t miss more school;
because even one more day
at school would kill me;
because the bus finally makes it,
and seeing Don standing
under the port next to his van
floods me with relief;
because his wife, Lorna, is with him
and she is so happy
to see me, they won’t be alone
this winter after all
and she has so much to teach me
about the earth, the
environment, the building blocks
of the natural world;
because Don couldn’t not let her
come along, we have
shopping to do and she wants to
buy her own things;
because Don doesn’t want to
answer my questions
while she’s around, so I have
to hold my tongue,
which is burning; because I can’t
even wait until Lorna
rounds the corner with the first
load of groceries to
blurt out a word I’ve never used
before, pedophile, a word
that sounds like what it means;
because he tells me
my understanding of its meaning
is wrong, or not wrong
but imprecise; because what he feels
is not attraction but
fondness; because who is society
to tell us what we can
and can’t do with our own bodies?;
because it is not something
most people understand; because
I want to understand
and react badly when he tells me
to stop, to settle down;
because it’s time to take the rest
of the groceries inside
and then there’s dinner to make;
because it takes ages
for Lorna to finally retire
to her own small cabin
fifty metres down the road,
a replica of Thoreau’s
at Walden Pond surrounded
by a grove of poplar
and birch, with a large window
facing the road;
because society thinks it can
regulate our desires;
because as soon as we’re alone
we are naked, face-to-face
on the Big Bed, a kerosene lamp
on an unopened book
between us, which makes his eyes
twinkle and his skin glow
like a source of heat; because
I’m tired of hugging
my knees; because when he asks,
Doesn’t it feel good? and
Why should you or I be ashamed of it?,
I don’t really have
an answer; because his logic
seems completely solid;
because I let him take things
further than before,
let him show me how
he does it to himself;
Forest Glen, 1990 – Fall
Because the room is a one-room
cabin with a bed,
a desk and a step ladder that
leads up to a small loft
where Lorna keeps her books,
no toilet, not even
a sink with running water
to wash her face,
so she has to bathe in the house;
because I have
to stay upstairs when Lorna
is naked and peek
through the cracks in the floor
to see what she
looks like; because the floor
is made of a single
layer of hardwood, wide panels
hewn from trees
that stood where Don cleared
the land to build
his house; because Lorna’s breasts
are larger and fuller
than I expected from her shirt,
heavy, white balloons
hanging gracefully from her chest
as she leans over
with a towel to dry a leg;
because I shuffle
from gap to gap to watch her
as she crosses the room;
because I imagine her
coming upstairs
instead of Don, or at least
joining us; because she says,
Josh! I hope you’re not peeking and
I can hear you breathing
through the cracks, so I scramble
off the floor, almost
knocking a bookshelf over;
because Don comes up
fifteen minutes later to tell me
tonight he’s going
to Lorna’s, so I have to spend
the next few hours
alone, terrified both of the dark
upstairs, and of being
seen by marauders in the light
of the kitchen below,
where there is no place to hide
from anyone; because
when Don returns I am almost out
of breath with relief
yet deny it vehemently when he
teases me for being
scared; because the whole point
&n
bsp; of me being here
is to not be afraid,
and it embarrasses me
that I am not truly wild
the way I pretend to be,
and when Lorna later calls me
coureur des bois—
runner of the woods, I feel ashamed
that even a walk
to the chicken coop, or down
to the river, makes me
want to run in fear of what might
try to get me; because
I never venture into the forest
alone like E., the boy
from the valley who disappears
for days at a time
just to be alone, who emerges
unscathed by the dark
and sometimes even
bearing a trophy,
a rabbit or a grouse, which Don
strips and spices
and roasts with root vegetables
from the cellar,
which I fetch by climbing down
through a small trapdoor
in the middle of the floor,
terrified of what
might happen if it closed;
Forest Glen, 1990 – Fall
Because the room is the top floor
of the cabin where we
are completely alone for the first
time ever, no other kids,
Lorna fifty metres away in her retreat
and no neighbours
for five miles in the only direction
possible to travel by road;
because I’ve just completed my first
assignment for Don’s
“class,” three questions on Plato’s
Ion (1. he was a poet,
2. he couldn’t defend his verse,
3. he must have been
blessed by forces larger than himself),
which leads to more
questions (1. was he a real poet
or merely a performer
of someone else’s words?
2. what wisdom does
poetry express that plainspoken
knowledge cannot
through logic deduce?); because
math class is Chapter 1
of Euclid’s proofs; because
the books are old, worn
with study; because Don turns on
the generator as soon
as the lesson is over so we
can watch Dead Poets
Society on VHS starring Don
as Robin Williams and me
as the deep-feeling guy who dies
at the end (which
prompts me to ask: Why
would someone kill himself
just to get back at his dad?)
until the gas runs out;
because the generator can
only run for two hours
max on a single tank of gas,
so we’re lucky we make it
to the credits before the television
blacks out, along with
the room; because matches
are found by groping hands
and a single candle is lit,
a slim embryo of light
in a wooden womb, a chiaroscuro:
Man and Boy on Bed,
Don’s stack of Hustlers no longer
hidden but just out
of reach, so he says, Go ahead,
take a look; because
Don wants to use his mouth
this time, reminds me
that I promised to let him once
we got to know each other
a little more; because I once used
the phrase he used
with me the first time I asked him
what the inside of a girl
felt like, which was the first time
we met and his hand
was covered in my sister’s lotion,
which he slathered
all over my chest and down
my legs, wherever my skin
was exposed; because my answer
is still no — and I’m not
sure why it’s such a big deal
but now it’s a matter
of principle; because he tries
to lower his head
anyway, so I push at his scalp, pull
his thinning hair away;
because he turns his back to me
and I feel bad for him,
so I pull him back around but keep
my belly facedown
so all he can tickle is my rump
until I pass out, wake up
uncovered with the winter sun
licking me, bright,
without heat;
Forest Glen, 1990 – Winter
Because the room is a cabin
surrounded by frost-
bitten trees, where torrents
of white gather
in furious gusts, get tangled
in branches or ram
themselves into trunks; because
the wind is literally
howling at the walls where
Lorna and I sit
sipping tea among scattered
clothes, dirty cups
and jars of pee, waiting for the
gale to pass;
because the outhouse is fifty
metres away and
outside the wind whips ice
into our faces;
because it is better to sleep
with the tang of urine
than to go outside and fight
the blowing snow
just to relieve some tension;
because the room
is thick with incense, bunches
of lavender hang
from rafters absorbing smoke
from the tiny cones
that smoulder and ossify in
a bowl on Lorna’s desk,
become fragile dust that explodes
and settles on the sill
of the frost-covered window
every time one of us
sneezes or coughs; because it is
deep winter, inviting
meditation and sleep; because Don
is out with J., our new
student (taken on for the spring)
getting groceries
and making phone calls from
the old rotary telephone
in the schoolhouse:
J. to his mother in
Montreal, Don to his tax advisor;
because Lorna sings
the song of my name to me:
my name fought a battle
and the walls came a-tumbling down;
because it wasn’t his horn
that felled the city but his eyes —
through Joshua’s eyes
God saw what Jericho had become
and saw fit to shatter it;
because to see is to devastate;
because Lorna believes
that science is the study of life,
and that to study life
you have to look at life —
only in the natural world
can the answer be found; because
Lorna had the potential
to turn the world of cell biology
upside down, and when
Don tells me later that he wrote
Lorna’s dissertation
after she had a nervous break-
down, he makes sure
to point out that the core research
was hers; because Lorna
believes it’s not the observation of things
but their beings,
their being-ness that clues us in
to dimensions that exist
beyond our single slice of the universe;
because Lorna wants
to teach me how to meditate,
how to block out thought
but not the senses, so that I, too, can
feel the other bodies
&n
bsp; I have lived in; because I imagine
my previous lives
stacked like sheets of paper,
on each one a story
of who you were and how you got here;
because I beg Lorna
to ask about me the next time
she talks to the Voice
of Light, a woman in San Antonio,
Texas, whom Lorna calls
every few months to get patched
through to God;
because God is not a man
but a highway along
which all souls travel, occasionally
falling off and dropping
into lives like the ones we’re in
right now; because,
sometimes, the souls of lovers
dive off the side
of the highway, one chasing
the other so that
they can be together longer,
only to end up brothers
or on opposite sides of a war;
1991
Forest Glen, 1991 – Spring
Because the room is a theatre
where the last war ever
is taking place, Desert Storm,
Stormin’ Norman,
Colin Powell and a sober ex-vice-
president whom Don
says controls things quietly, pushing
buttons to kill Iraqis,
thousands of them at a time,
while the Yanks
and the French, the dozens of other
countries there for show
die exclusively by friendly fire,
a few at a time; because
I proclaim this war to be the last
one ever, and Lorna
agrees with me; because
You don’t have to worry
about who will win, the stakes are so
uneven; because every
town in America has yellow ribbons
tied to their trees
and awnings and porch pillars,
tied to signs saying
Support Our Troops and Not One Life
though none of our boys
it seems are in any real danger
except from themselves
and the weather; because it’s so cold
I can’t even imagine
the heat of a desert; because
the last time we protested
the country almost shattered (Don);
because we’ve
been here before, it was the same
in Athens (Lorna);
because Lorna and Don were there,
two athletes, friends,
men competing against each other
and they’re still trying
to finish their race after all these
years; because I was
a monk in my past life (she asked!)
and before that a swami
in India, which is disappointing;
because the Voice of Light
thinks my purpose in life is to
reconcile Christianity
with Reincarnation, neither of which
strikes me as particularly
interesting; because I’d rather ask her
silly questions like
what if a dinosaur in the year minus
2 million came back
as a house cat on a spaceship
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