O Canada

Some nights he’d watch hockey and so she’d rock

with a novel or her Valéry and go to France

where she and several guests of the gay prince

picnic and play at croquet on the château grounds.

Lace and ribbons are all the fashion rage

and ladies in chiffon and high coiffures

fan their bright bosoms like birds of song.

And there are men with names like pink flowers

or instruments of sound in silk stockings

and plump satin breeches to knee length who seem fond

of dabbing their rouged lips with handkerchiefs

they keep in their coat sleeves for such occasions

while all around their wigs hum yellow honeybees,

drawn to their powders and colognes and toiletries.

And she is out among them. And her hand is kissed

by gentlemen of rank and her opinion sought

on Couperin and Molière and Poussin—

all high etiquette and courtly talk.

Out in the garden, she hears the gardener sing,

between hedgerows of juniper and yew,

O Canada, our home and native land. He moves

by evening light through his green diocese,

smelling of dung and mulch and growing things,

heartsick for that hard country of his youth.

Some nights he’d take her to his room upstairs

and speak in that far dialect she loved

of ice and earth and qualities of air—

his True North, strong and free, O Canada;

and then he’d make hardbody love to her.

Next morning she’d make omelettes and he’d thumb

the newspaper for word of Guy Lafleur

or Marcel Dionne. And she’d be pleased because

that was the style of the country he’d come from.

Source: Skating with Heather Grace (1986)