I used to be Coe Hill, the Canadian Shield, where rocks jut out of earth like exposed bone. It was dynamite that broke them down creating roadways like dry rivers to goldmines with no gold. Coe Hill with its roads and cold lakes named after dead relatives of mine and ancient farm equipment lying in unfarmed fields like dinosaur bones flaking with rust, eroded by sunlight. Coe Hill where the horses run like wild horses unfenced by fences and swim in the lake like children, their joy expressed through their good strong muscles and the way they look at each other with their wide, round eyes. Coe Hill and the wood stove in winter. The wild flowers in spring.
Now I am Toronto, fast and crowded, grey and full of bursts of colour, anonymity and constant exposure, rush hour. Toronto with its sidewalks and hard edges and me still dazzled by city lights, even after all this time. I am Toronto the way a lover can never know the way they are beheld by their beloved, a belonging that fits so right but is still secondhand, still someone else’s. Toronto, like the places you can wander into, strange and heated on cold days, parks offering relief from unforgiving cement, the rumbling of bright red streetcars, feeling both lost and found, at home in a crowd.
More home to me than home ever was. A pigeon, more majestic
than a hawk. Greater than all the buildings that surround us, that unwanted bird, so loved, so hard to get rid of.