Before his paintings fared out of his brush
the accidental grandeur of burnt woods
turned him aside. Behind
the thick dark cedar screen
of Time where all that changes, stilled
and verified by art, unchanging lives,
in birch-white solitudes he made a pledge
to something on some always distant shore
that beckoned his canoe beyond the lampit edge
of crowded cities, towns.
The charcoal hush
of evening, deep Muskoka rivers, lakes
where deer come down to drink the lapping moon
he caught on canvas -- with a sense of things unseen.
He took the meausre of the tallest tree.
In you, beleagured Jackpine, native Harp,
the wind's gnarled language learned to reproduce;
spread-eagled, straining arms against the sky,
your thunder-shaped, deep-throated silent Cry
he captured -- rooted fast in shouts of paint.
When maples kindled south of Mattawa
and burnded boughed heaven's arching dome:
when autumn flamed through shadow-crafted aisles
of branching latticeworkd more brilliantly designed
than Chartres' rhetoric of stony lace -- he saw
how everything breathed truth, and felt at home
for the first time as sight and insight merged
-- Algonquin's solitary soul with his entwined
as he poured out his self-commissioned praise
grandiloquent as warpaint on the world.
The undeflected compass of his dreams
led far beyond Algoma Central's farthest rail
to reach those treasures hidden in plain sight --
silken cobwebs chandeliered with rain,
the sould within a rock, the whirling pool
solidified in whorls of knotted maple grain,
the Spirit's thereness everywhere intact:
each nothing stone the cosmos held in place,
no smallest insect moved except by grace.
-- Some inner map of innocence and awe
had led him deep within himself to find
our land's rich emptiness.
He struck it big.
In motherlodes of feeling still underminded,
a flash of certitude, a radiant strange Force
awakened him while others lay asleep.
Impervious to critics' yelping tomahawks,
nostalgia for the future made more clear
what's never missed until it's found -- most near,
most far -- the earth entrusted to our keep,
the native soil where freedom has its source.
The many scattered fragments of Perhaps
(a dance of dappled mirros on a twig
where spinning leaves collect the wind)
he salvaged -- showing us a world unseen
until intrepid distances explored his eyes
with new perspectives, forms fresh as that lake
compacted to a 10-inch square of beaverboard
where tamarack at tamarack still-gaze
across a resinous black pool ablaze
with sunset's burning flames -- a scene
to call for celebration in whatever room
it glows.
So one enduring masterpiece --
homemade -- familiar friend to all, in hearts
too long aggresively indifferent, wakes
some latent feeling -- half-asleep -- to sing.
Our future was the past too long assigned
to others. Now we have a voice that sees
cantata-clear white hemlock tapestries,
blue shadows on white arioso snow.
Not what he saw but what he knew ws there
he fleshed upon nude canvas -- lavish, spare,
lovingly unveiled in unpremeditated art.
In contemplation all remembrance dies.
The field of vision's narrowed to a cloud
is ointments on a stick. Both humbe/proud
the artist/shaman heals, and witless/wise
unknowing, knows. He sees by going blind
invisible bright objects silent/loud
as crimson on a leaf.
Sometimes we find
the future's passed before the present dawns
-- yet how his yellow/blues melt into green,
an always-present mixing in our eyes
an endless spring.
***
One cloudy day
he took his fishing tackle, lit his pipe,
shoved off from shore and paddled far away
-- into his pictures. Clutching the last straw
of light, hands slipping from the cold
ascending surface of the lake
he disappeared.
In rough unsettled solitudes
of tamarack and maple, lake and stream,
our country's northern soul forever broods:
its solemn, sweet, sad joy, its many moods
remote and reticent he caught as in a dream
still haunting us -- the woods within the woods.
