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vastimpersonalforces · 7 years

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African Canadian in Union Blue

by Michael Fraser; winner, CBC Poetry Prize, 2016 I was AWOL, an unpaid ridge runner, hawking distance from the coal-shaded Fifty-fourth Massachusetts, pulling fleet foot through night brush, my feet bramble-clawed and day-sore yowling for a pair of spendy cruisers. Bounty men near caught me in tamarack larch. I saw their smoothbore guns day clear, their eyes haired-up and owly. I was hanging by my eyelids and angled abeam through light-blazed meadow balm, jumping log cob and bull stumps, moss-bitten rot-hole fallers, deploying all the natural speed my buck-bred seed-folk gave me. I was baseborn in Chatham, mammy giving life to six pin-baskets in a rickety pushcart. If I were to see him now, I'd ask daddy why he heeled-off before eyeing me wrapped in scrapped yarn. His master named him John, echoing the new testament, and what mammy's broken water branded me. Whitney's cotton gin nearly snapped his hamitic saddle-brown back half open. Some days he bleated raw like a crushed side-born calf, sliding away from full breath. Heard he upped and skyrooted through Virginia pine faster than whiskey jacks whistling over feed camps, and sparked mammy's teenage mind before stone-rolling to his novel life, a rail toad booming around rusted aged jimmys and ragshag toonerville trolleys. I continued dim-moon travelling west through puckerbush, sledge, and prick-filled tanglewood, lodging with other lucked-out negroes beside slick calm finger lakes, hauling soaked rick to hem-load tipcarts. We'd light down to chew tuff cow-greased pone before snacking tobacco ropes, our smoky tea-skinned black bodies day-whipped and legged out. White clodhopper abolitionists and schoolmarms let me sleep on shakedowns and boil-up my battered threads out back, stooped over hose bibbs, rubboards, or wind-turned mill wash. A swamp Yankee and his jake leg wife above Rochester stodged up scrapple, fire-burnt tunkup, and slack salted Pope's nose. We popped it down with overproof lamp oil and everyone was all in, plow shined. My mind was so jag skated, I talked all my closed business like I was up a redwood tree. Can't extract when my head clunked the sewed-rag shuck bed. I night-woke bedfast with scarlet runners beetling my bare flesh. Sweat runnelled and rilled either side of my chest hillslopes. Heard hushed words and realised they were studying to forlay me to sellers. Morning I pretended to smudge along, then lit out crow-quick past tumps and shadebark glades of knurled hickory. On the final night, I met bullhorn thunderheads throwing froth-smurred gulley washers and stump-mover skies. I squinched and child-stivered through teeming chizzly freshets that sizzled and gaffed me, the mud water pooling the path's apron. Almost done in, I saw America's back forty sproutland, sun-glimming and drying after the rains had sugared-off. I went down the ravine scoop smiling towards birlers and their floaty Niagara chuck boats, waiting to river cross into Canaan.

#poetry #michael fraser #african canadian #in union blue

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