A NEW POEM (Work-in-Progress): Jon Cone

 

Home: an essayy

 

And that was that, lines drawn. Therein sections of land for family or families. It gives what is fruitful the land of apportions.  

And they cunningly made no writ to stand on. 

The great waters can never be assigned, nor the sky nor sun nor moon nor stars, nor the land the portion of the body of our Mother. No people shall have advantage over any other.

A rod is 16 ½ feet. A chain is 66 feet or 4 rods or 100 links. A link being 7.92 inches. A mile is 320 rods, 80 chains, or 5,280 feet. A square rod is 272 ¼ square feet. An acre contains 43,560 square feet. And an acre contains 100 square rods. And an acre is more or less 208 ¾ feet square. An acre is 8 rods wide by 20 rods long or any two numbers (of rods) whose product is 160 and so forth.

A sectional map of a township with adjoining sections. Such land, such rich soil, a veritable Eden!   

Odysseus the sea’s surveyor, cunning reader of maps he returned home from exile by labyrinthine route.  The memory of my father’s stutter is a threshold forever linked in my mind to the idea of home.  My mother asking my father to sing, “Oh sing for me Peter you’ve a lovely voice.” And rough as an old nail he sang.

And the farm called Magiscroft comprising a large white house with green trim, a smaller white cottage with rose trim, a garage, a barn, a chicken coop no longer used. The land fenced, including a gentle creek and small pond. The pond that would freeze in winter. The children would skate and chase each other with long branches and sticks.

Having no home, having been born in a village, having been taken from that village at the age of six months, having crossed the Atlantic, having entered the St. Lawrence, passing through Montreal to Toronto to Richmond Hill to Guelph to London, having felt unease a permanent condition of living – a poverty of the soul.

And Saint Thomas the Patron saint of surveyors who watched over the sectioning of the land West of the Mississippi

And the prophet Ezekiel sacred draughtsman and homeowner:   

That I too have been at home somewhere anywhere                                               along the coast looking seaward or pinned or resting inland -                                  by the creek I gazed upward at floes of cloud -                                                    this is the mind at leisure

                                                On Mill Pond in January the children gathered in skates to play a rolling game of ice hockey.  Shovels brought from home in the event of heavy snow the ice would need clearing. The mill unused for 157 year [sic].

 

In winter boys hoped to see girls out walking. How sun-lit a smile on a clear winter day …

          The same clouds that exist within the life span of droplets                         for ten minutes, familiar not familiar, moving west so trees with their familiar bend                                                   

Never before seen old faces moving homeward where families wait and one would hope love for the taking and giving and the young man could take a young wife only upon demonstrating he could build a roof

 

And waking early to see stars

And making coffee in the kitchen ship-wrecked from night before

And falling in love and then taking forty years to fall out of love

That is a cruelty of no one’s invention nonetheless a cruelty

Don't be deceived there are no victors in such case 

The only importance is to throw one’s physical self into the air from the hay loft to feel suspended in an infinity of ultimate finitude and later the sun on one’s head bent over the thrill of the creek's blazing strangeness 

The people of that land knew one day the gate would come down