There’s no official bird of Canada but if there were it would be a bird that could write letters to the editor about how it thinks pelicans are fat.

There were Elizabeth Bishop buttercups

and a few Elizabeth Bishop daisies.

There was Donk’s ‘The Otter’s Deposition’

and Fatchett’s ‘Sestina for a Tendril.’

Most poems were Toronto apartments,

though, and the trope of Winnipeg snows

was as rare as a Leonard Cohen sighting

outside chez Les Bobards in Montreal.

Nineteenth-century American lit

is more awkward than Canadian lit

because it didn’t have the example

of twentieth-century America.

Canada had fuckable trees, spruce and larch,

but it also had baseball and ketchup hearts.

Our prime ministers looked at all the birds,

grateful every one was not a poem.