blue skies poetry

Steering the lazy S-curves
that descend to meander beside a creek
then angle up the walls of a ravine
onto undulating flatland again
and a view of ranges
blue and icy with the distant cold

	Or in blown snow
 	that crosses the pavement in waves
	higher than my vehicle, the gusts
                increasing in force and duration
  	until I enter a whiteout
  	of buffeting flakes: only the hood visible
	ahead, and a white line on asphalt to my right
	intermittently glimpsed 
	in the storm’s brief lulls
	Geared down to low, tensed for
	a wreck splayed across the blizzard
	or someone overtaking me who misjudges
	the friction possible on this frozen surface
	I inch onward, the cabin around me
	with its ordinary seats, pile of CDs,
	more real that the bright blankness
	streaming past every window
	Then the shock of
	a blurred figure in the centre of the road
	gesturing at me
	with the bulk of a jackknifed tractor-trailer behind
	slammed into a pickup, another shadow
	signaling me to crawl past
	groups of men, a row of cars
	stopped beyond the catastrophe
Or the freeway that cleaves to a valley bottom
until the route lifts higher inland to avoid a bluff
before dropping again to scud on by a wide river
Engine and wheels and blacktop
rolling smooth as sky, as flame 
as a quick-tempo, mellifluous folk tune about
a wanderer’s love of
both city blocks and open country
	The two-lanes and four-lanes we accelerate down
	are not only artificial constructs
	but breathe through our encounters with them
	–each highway a colossal sculpture
	whose shapes and textures our tires, our presence
	touch and respond to
	just how a symphonic work
	takes form via notation, rehearsals and an eventual cascade of
	phrasing, key changes, inflections, pauses
	that exist in the ear, the mind
	–engineering of culverts and surface
	leveling, compacting, the requisite
	bank to curves, all
	performed, traveled, that carry us
	across stretches of time and distance
	–every road with its own essence: signatures, bars, movements where
	our thoughts drift, and other passages
	that rear up foremost in our being: where we live
                in this music, this art, this
	transport that out of so much labor and
	chord progressions, infelicities and solutions
	reaches from the past to offer
	a crafted, communal
	munificence

~ Tom Wayman

Tom Wayman currently teaches English and creative writing at the University of Calgary, after a long career teaching in mainstream and alternative post-secondary writing programs in B.C. In Winter 2007 he was the Fulbright Visiting Chair in Creative Writing at Arizona State University, and in October 2007 will hold the Ralph Gustafson Chair in Poetry at Malaspina University-College, Nanaimo, B.C. His most recent books (2007) are a collection of poems, High Speed Through Shoaling Water, and a first collection of short fiction, Boundary Country. He is president of the board of Sheri-D Wilson’s Calgary International Spoken Word Festival.

Filed under: Tom Wayman, Writing the Land by akublik Date 13 September, 2007