Our last spring in Canada began
as the end of winter. The seized hinges
in the throats of blackbirds bespoke the protracted eke

of transition. The melt began at the radiant eaves
and spread its dripping melodrama out
until the very world wept

katharsis. Steady paycheques
held out their compromised promises
with invisible hands, handkerchiefs to blow

our congested hopes on, which now we examine for blood
or other evidence of their rootedness
in something beneath Idea.

A stop at Ikea ushers in
many a new era among the precariat,
us no different: a detour to Chicago’s suburbs

issues in a new set of sheets (a step up in thread count!),
a slipcover to refurb the old couch,
a toilet brush: odds and ends

to begin again as if to refute
the paradox inherent in the phrase itself,
“begin again”—an action more proper to rejected novels

than whole lives. Oh well. Luck may be blind
and wisdom dumb, but money’s touch
we can’t help but feel, and taste

its consequences. We actually live
further north now than where we came from,
a fact both we and the locals acknowledge in geography

but not imagination. Our first winter as Wisconsinites
finds us pining—such a typically Ontarian verb,
so ridiculously CanLit—not for Home

or some love beyond the welcome
we’ve received as fellow polar folk in need of warming,
but if anything, for the sense of loss gone missing amid all this normal.

Stewart Cole is the author of the poetry collection Questions in Bed, published by Goose Lane’s Ice House imprint in 2012. His reviews of Canadian poetry appear regularly at The Urge (theurgepoetry.blogspot.com). He is recently transplanted to Wisconsin, where he teaches at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh.

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