Solipsism while dying

Or so I thought, lying in the bed
being regretted

added: What will they do now
that I, that all
depending on me disappears?

Where will be Belleville?

Kingston?

(the fields
I held between, the lake
boats

t o r o N T O

Thoughts from underground

When I first reached this country
I hated it
and I hated it more each year:

in summer the light a
violent blur, the heat
thick as a swamp,
the green things fiercely
shoving themselves upwards, the
eyelids bitten by insects

In winter our teeth were brittle
with cold. We fed on squirrels.
At night the house cracked.
In the mornings, we thawed
the bad bread over the stove.

Then we were made successful
and I felt I ought to love
this country.
I said I loved it
and my mind saw double.

I began to forget myself
in the middle
of sentences. Events
were split apart

I fought. I constructed
desperate paragraphs of praise, everyone
ought to love it because
and set them up at intervals

due to natural resources, native industry, superior
penitentiaries
we will all be rich and powerful

flat as highway billboards

who can doubt it, look how
fast Belleville is growing

(though it is still no place for an english gentleman)

Alternate thoughts from underground

Down. Shovelled. Can hear
faintly laughter, footsteps;
the shrill of glass and steel

the invaders of those for whom
shelter was wood,
fire was terror and sacred

the inheritors, the raisers
of glib superstructures.

My heart silted by decades
of older thoughts, yet prays

O topple this glass pride, fireless
rivetted babylon, prays
through subsoil
to my wooden fossil God.

But they prevail. Extinct. I feel
scorn but also pil y: what
the bones of the giant reptiles

done under by the thing
(may call it
climate) outside the circle
they drew by their closed senses
of what was right

felt when scuttled
across, nested in by the velvet immoral
uncalloused and armourless mammals.

Resurrection

I see now I see
now I cannot see

earth is a blizzard in my eyes

I hear now

the rustle of the snow

the angels listening above me

thistles bright with sleet
gathering

waiting for the time
to reach me
up to the pillared
sun, the final city

or living towers

unrisen yet
whose dormant stones lie folding
their holy fire around me

(but the land shifts with frost
and those who have become the stone
voices of the land
shift also and say