I was seventeen when you
left Toronto and travelled
to a land of lean nomenclature.
 
I imagined you glided weightless,
through the tundra’s blunt
panorama — a lull from
 
the ceremony of civil service,
where everyone wore a mask.
Thumbing through your book
 
that dismantled government’s
dim labyrinths, I understood
what drew you to the hinterlands.
 
You knew even the most austere
facades hold contradictions:
the snow’s lucid perfection
 
in morning; its cracked patina,
at night, like the articulated
scales on some biblical creature.
 
A mother now, I stare across vistas,
the immensity of your death
— cruel Leviathan — slithers
 
on either side of me, leaving
behind its brutal wake — 
the tentacled past, this trail
 
of rust. You were so young
when you learned to kneel
to each day’s finespun chaos.
 
& now I am too old to accept
all our ruptured itineraries:
missed trips, birthdays,
 
anniversaries. Do I still possess
the unwritten sweetness
you witnessed in me, all those
 
tracts of verse you read,
on a loop? Dad, there are depths
to your absence — my love —
 
that devour the ribbon
of invention, so that only words
anchor me to this expanse
 
& the terrible softness
of my body.

—Cara Waterfall

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