MAGNIFY

                                    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 one minute, dancing in the sunlight

the next.

“Genius,” he called me after Alzheimer’s had stolen my

name. “Poet,” he stroked my hands as I tried to feed him

cranberry juice through a straw he refused. I watched

prose dissolve into poetry under the overwhelming tide

of mind-loss, beginning the moment he locked his keys

in the car without setting the brake so it rolled into the

ocean. He stood and watched it, then announced we’d

be walking home that day. 

There is, he told me, years before, an eloquence

to silence, perhaps my hardest lesson as we knelt in the

canoe and pushed off from the Simcoe beach, the water

droplets our paddles carried over the surface the only sound.

A whirlpool’s hush from a J-Stroke kept us straight. In the silence

he taught me the depth of life, interminable, exhausting. Those

evenings we paddled for hours. And when we returned, I had

the golden feeling of nothing having happened of value. But he

would assure me in his long wordless strides something beautiful had.