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Showing posts from June, 2014

MAGNIFY

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                                    for James Shaver I want to live every moment as a promise unbroken and flowing to my grandfather who when we walked to water pump In the park in Orillia looked up and announced in his French Canadian ancestry, “Quelle mélange de couleur” and I asked him what he’d said and he, being deaf and understanding the question to mean I hadn’t heard him, repeated it en Francais and I somehow understood him the second time and didn’t need to hear it the third. Language is its own water underneath the earth of thought. From his deafness, now my deafness, he only spoke to illuminate, to magnify some lost treasure the rest of us were missing. Family arguments died under the blade of a Shakespeare quote. Rough waters calmed. “You going to be a poet, pet?” he asked as we clipped the wet laundry onto the line between their cottage and the next. There was only one correct answer and I said it, cool cotton heavy in my hands on