Of the Thousand Islands
Have mort! to do than take up challenges
From perfect strangers;
Agoraphobia among empty spaces,
The mountain ranges, the plains of corn,
Peoples the street at history's intersections
With famous faces.
Heart of Midlothian, the milky mother
(Sir Walter's Doric) of sane masterpieces
Fed at that flaccid udder, Walter Scott,
Great lax geometer, first plotted them,
Triangulations that explode
The architect's box of space, and by a torsion
As
bland as violent sprain
Narrative time and the archives' single slot.
What's to be seen of old Fort Frontenac?
The British fortress, by a hundred years
More recent, but still Old
Fort Henry, draws the Buick. Of the Frenchman
A mound remains by Kingston's waterfront
And a cadence out of Parkman: "At Versailles
A portrait, beautiful and young, Minerva .
Intervals in what never meets the eye
Meet the ear sooner, music's images
Not of Ontario's spaces but of spaces
Sketched by a gesture, virtual and French.
Alas for Caliban. The Thousand Islands
Were full of noises,
"
Landscape and history echoing back and forth
Under immense skies, till his master
Cabined his spaces in a folio
And Euclids of the tepee, leaning-to
Birch-pole isosceles in a glade of hemlocks,
Drank deafening whisky in a written treaty.
Donald Davie
