Vol 1 No 1 2007
Elegy without Water
not even a year and already there are too many
dead fathers reaching up from their couches
and easy chairs to be missed in photos and at
tables and who knows how long this will keep
happening like the death of the hired man like
the man who was willing my dead father
keeps saying he would have loved it if he
caught the steam train with us to the mill
that one day we took off that sawdust
August (five mountain ranges one behind
the other the buzzsaw
snarled and rattled)
my father would have talked a blue
streak to the conductor with one green eye and
grinned his denture grin at the double saws
shook his head at the film we shot
the singing blacksmith with his clean
apron and swept forge and the weasel who darted
into the bush at the whir of the camera I keep
finding things my father would have loved if
Tanis MacDonald