I removed a jar from Tennessee

for/after Don McKay & Andrew Suknaski

a jar, & its perpetual jarness,
implies storage

& the stream, how one jar
floats between waves

upon a hill, the north sask
atchewan river, old poems

in cigar tubes, floating
keep wilderness wild

in my mind, grown in wilderness
included there

the more human evidence ― a rusted can
or license plate, a jar

in the glengarry mud

evidence of what was wild
before, a stick of decades

& a broken branch; the one room
school my fathers father

first broke a spell; the space between
since turned to wild

as what this all might be, again
& eventually

as evidence of what was still
to come




originally appeared in The New Chief Tongue / published in July 2006 of[f] Main Street, Ottawa. above/ground press broadside #255