TIME ALSO WENT BACKWARDS

​For years, drawn by the magnetic pull
of contract teaching in the Kootenays
and a lover on the plains, I swung east 
from the Coast to cross three mountain ranges,
crossed an ancient seabed, flat with grain,
and back again. A pendulum 

marking my seasons
although time also went backwards 
when I climbed from spring-green farmlands 
through foothills, first buds on their winter branches,
past the snowline, heaped and dirty on its verges, climbed
into a silent white world, its Arctic-blue shadows,
then down into spring again. A metronome:

the hours clicked on, kept pace with CBC’s
docs and weather reports, kept ahead of
squalls and snow flurries 
as I crossed time-zones, and long silences 
as I moved in and out of range,
the frequencies infrequent, so I often missed the point
of interviews, and seldom knew how documentaries ended. 
A nomad following food sources, 
I tracked the best coffeehouses: Salmon Arm, Golden, Field
with its fossil-bearing overhang of Burgess Shale,
beacons welcome as inukshuks.  

The evenness of time, fatigue, boredom erratically punctuated 
by disasters. Once, left the coast before daylight, turned the radio off 
and sang along with Leonard’s CDs. Only coming down 
the old highway’s switchbacks into the Okanagan, did I tune in 
to a science fiction nightmare of plane attacks and crumbling buildings.
It was 9/11. All the way to Lethbridge, I had no one to tell.

Another trek coincided with Jack Layton’s funeral. I’d liked le bon Jack
and wept along with the bereaved and their careful accolades
as I drove in and out of radio reception. It seemed disrespectful
to stop for coffee, and I remembered 
all the other funerals: how, when time came
to decant my mother’s ashes in the churchyard,
the canister lid jammed, 
how an unseemly tussle ensued, as though
unscrewing a stuck mayonnaise jar, so 
when it finally came off a cloud of ashes 
scattered like confetti.

Photo by LCF