"Southern Ontario" by - The New Quarterly Digital Edition

I dreamed of the St Lawrence Seaway.
The towns buried within it
haunted my thoughts
every time I looked out across the water.
Your dad offered to take us out in the boat
where the road descended into water,
to see what was left behind.
But I couldn’t imagine floating
above the lost villages,
peering down at chimneys and foundations.
Seeing those towns like that seems
less like flying, more like drowning.
I dreamed of Lake Ontario.
How we were tossed around
like leaves as we screamed into the wind
waves filling everything with sand
while we laughed.
We watched a paraglider
dance along the crests on the lake
escorted by the same wind
that burned my face and shoulders
as we walked up the hard packed sand.
I dreamed of our little yellow house
in that town on the Seaway
that rattled when the train went by.
I cried that first night there,
thinking I would never sleep again,
thinking the move was a mistake.
How could I be homesick when I was home?
Rumor has it -a long time ago-
kids bowled skulls down that dead-end street
where it ran parallel to the railway tracks.
Skulls that they had stolen
from the old cemetery on Buell Creek.
Was that real?
Or was that just a story we told
when we sat outside, drinking wine in the dark
listening for clattering bones, from
the creek in the ravine
as fireflies blinked across the lawn?
What I dreamed of seems smaller now-
ten years later I can’t get my bearings
as we drive through.
The buildings are packed too close together
crowding me with the shadows
of all the years in between now and then.

Photo graciously provided by Cody Board from Unsplash.