1.
The Canadian Shield calls to the fault
in Timiskaming Lake. The Shield shelters
more than half the land. The fault, tectonic,
replies with the Ottawa River, whose waters run east
and spread at the place of two mountains.
Becoming lake. In this way the lake is of lake,
song of song, Deux-Montagnes out of Timiskaming.
The lake there, at the two mountains, calls
to the trees near and around, riparian trees
on rocky shores and the terrestrials
within two miles of the shore. Perpetual loop.
One verse then the other. Connecting
trees to the sand, the orthic, melanic, brunisol soil,
tree canopies, consolations of climate.
The way birds in the morning define the new day,
call sunrise from night.
2.
The trees call to each other their own
names: sugar maple, hickory, eastern white pine.
Black willow chants the alphabets of green ash.
Yellow birch calls to red maple, chokecherry to beech.
They bear multiple names: formal, scientific,
common French and the names that are Mohawk.
And no names at all. Their calls
travel through air, water, through earth,
sedges and shrubs, algae
and cumulus clouds. All conversing.
Rocks and black leeches. Sturgeon, green frogs.
Limestone and vascular plants.
3.
How does the sky
reply when silver-backed leaves tug at the wind,
blocking the passage to sea?
Clouds ring with rain
and the lake lifts small pewter washes
in rows of applause.
What listens to sugar maples’ clear amber flow?
Rays: yellow and cold.
Fine beads of drizzle
hiss the filigreed ice.
What answers flood cover drowning hickory knees?
Clay or silt. Till or clay loam. Sap in the spring.
4.
Sugar maple is always and in all places attentive,
alert for replies from the open terrain.
The soil, fine or sandy, alluvium,
measures the length of flood time in spring,
speaks a name to the climate,
the warmest in the whole province. Call
and response: a dominant tree, Acer saccharum,
a sweetness that humans tap into.