Thunder Bay

The cormorant at the ferry dock.
No people, but I was surrounded by the living.
5AM, Prince Rupert, British Columbia,
needed to wait till 6
for the ferry office to open, and the water
and fog and bird left me with 
the cab driver’s words:
It depends on the water,
when I asked about the ferry schedule,
and when I told him about my Canadian father
he whirled around in his seat, his eyes burning
into me, his arm reaching at me:

            You have to look for him
               You have to do this

I sat on the bench where Yellowhead Highway ran
to the sea, my body burning
its own rageful light—and there was no time, no sight, 
there just was—in that pure moment of being where we 
show our hearts—the stillwaters outside press
the only law of one body against another.

            How would I find him? 
            —no rest until I knew him and
            where he stood—
            A moment with this stranger on Highway 16
            and now awake in myself—

I rode the ferry to the train across Canada, 
running through Terrace and Edmonton, through Winnipeg, 
not knowing it was my father’s birthplace—
and on to Saskatoon, Sudbury—
And finally Thunder Bay, along the top of
Lake Superior, where the land breaks 
into ancient outcroppings, running into the Sleeping Giant
and the bedrock of the Canadian Shield—

and that’s when Lily came on board,  
her blue ribbon with white lace, clipped
to long brown hair—her almost vertical smile
rising into her thin face, and the mystical true 
came alive, she was my stranger, sister, 
and we talked, laughed silly
from Thunder Bay to Toronto. I stayed 
in her apartment, wildly stoned, waiting for 
my train home the next day. Not wanting
to pull away from her, I could feel the bones
of her thin shoulders, I could feel the call
of Union Station just blocks away, her soft hands
brushing my face as in leaving, she took her light
blue ribbon and clipped it in my hair. 

           I thought I would see her again—
           I thought I would find my way back—

I hold her ribbon, some thirty years gone,
in my writing desk, rising from that ferry dock
and the cormorant, the burning fog of 
my father, the law of her body against
mine, in Thunder Bay.