From Devil in the Woods. Published by Brick Books in 2019.

Dear Pierre: We all know that history amounts

to the collective will of those with the strength

to move waterways and name bits of creation

for themselves. From the parking lot, I want you

to know that this glorified pair of water buckets,

struts as if set down by a typesetter, await clean

sheets of paper to rise up from the water below

so they can emblazon their own mythology onto water

belonging to creation alone. Couldn’t help

but think of you when Lester declared that settlers

don’t need storytellers when they have engineers

to project mythologies, every realized blueprint

akin to rutting moose bugling into cloudless Shield nights.

We know how you can build every Confederation

myth into the stuff a school librarian had to fill

those stationary, engineered bookcases with. Every

page the kind of work that we expect from decades

of recreational sacred herbal expertise and belief

that a Injun-hating, fond-of-grain-liquor Scotsman

could have founded anything but a divot in a couch.

Lester and I agreed that we could do without

these rust-bucket portages for houseboat

tycoons. But a man who spun a nation

from a century of men making bad choices

for anyone but them is a man worth knowing,

‍

J.W.

‍