Acorn Press Canada

ISBN 1-894838-25-4
$15.95 CAD

THE TASTE OF WATER

Poetry by Frank Ledwell

This Is What I Remember

What I remember is the smell of birchwood
burning in the kitchen range, and the stories
of the once upon a time when horses ran back
into burning barns and forerunners told of death,
of a dog wailing all night before a tragedy
in the community, a roughbox seen at a gate,
a spirit appearing, a ghost ship, a cloven hoof.

What I remember is Chingachcook, the Last
of the Mohicans, the Little Match Girl, the Happy
Prince, being read or told at the oil-clothed table
beside the kitchen range — the smell of the kerosene lamp
at night. What I remember are the songs, “I’m a comin’
I’m a comin’ for my head I bendin’ low,” and “Thought
he was a goner, but the cat came back because he
couldn’t stay away.” And evenings of little Paul
on the fiddle and my mother at the piano
and reels and rounds of “Pigeon at the Gatepost”
and “Nellie in the Cornfield” and “Pop Goes the Weasel.”

And I remember the salt cod and blue potatoes,
and the fresh side-bacon from the recent-killed pig
sizzling in the pan, before the rest of the pork
would be salted down for the winter, and the
homemade beans this Saturday night. I remember
thinking: this is how is should be. This is how
it should be all the time — all of us wrapped up
together in the stories and in the music, connected
and bound by what brings us together. I remember
this because it was back in the once upon a time
when we shared each other’s stories, and the
woodstove
range and kitchen table were our common ground.

And then I realized what I think I always knew:
that story telling has never really left us, with
our mass media and mobility. There is always
someone coming along with a story to tell, whether
funny or sad, true or out of the imagination —
filling the room, sweeping over the listeners like aromatic
pipe smoke, rippling like brook water over the rocks,
catching up the hearers in its flow. People recognizing
themselves in the story, or creating stories of their own,
right then and there while they listen. “I remember
the time…” “Oh yes,” they will say, “and I remember
too, but it was another time — my time, my place,
my story.” A memory recollected, memory
believing, and the spirit of the spoken word taking hold.

And I remember, as I know you do too, how
stories swirled through my veins, in my blood, in my
bones,
pulsing, soaring — sometimes laughing,
sometimes crying — the shared love of family,
of community, of common culture. This is what
I remember and what I hope you remember too.

Late October

This falling I can hear:
the solitude of one leaf’s
reluctance to go. Close your eyes
and you can hear it too:
a single cricket’s final cry,
the blackbirds parliamenting
in the trees and, at the shore,
the acoustics of water lapping.

Boys stash away vacation bikes;
girls, sandals-shorts-halters.
Evening goes down like stage lights,
but, later, stars twinkle brighter
in the crisp air; geese track south
across the moon; asters, the last flowers
to bid adieu; potato crops rise from their
roots to greet the killing frost.

The ground is littered, holding
our memories in layers of leaves,
our eyes turning them like pages
to times when our own yearnings
loosened and fell, leaf by leaf. Someone
from the shadows comes and goes.
We will read and write letters
until the last leaf blows away.
The light now is sharper, if less.

TELL ME MORE

excerpt