WINTER 2014 SVPPLEMENT

The Unrequited North

  Our last spring in Canada began as the end of winter. The seized hinges in the throats of blackbirds bespoke the protracted eke of transition. The melt began at the radiant eaves and spread its dripping melodrama out until the very world wept katharsis. Steady paycheques held out their compromised promises with invisible hands, handkerchiefs to blow our congested hopes on, which now we examine for blood or other evidence of their rootedness in something beneath Idea. A stop at Ikea ushers in many a new era among the precariat, us no different: a detour to Chicago’s suburbs issues in a new set of sheets (a step up in thread count!), a slipcover to refurb the old couch, a toilet brush: odds and ends to begin again as if to refute the paradox inherent in the phrase itself, “begin again”—an action more proper to rejected novels than whole lives. Oh well. Luck may be blind and wisdom dumb, but money’s touch we can’t help but feel, and taste its consequences. We actually live further north now than where we came from, a fact both we and the locals acknowledge in geography but not imagination. Our first winter as Wisconsinites finds us pining—such a typically Ontarian verb, so ridiculously CanLit—not for Home or some love beyond the welcome we’ve received as fellow polar folk in need of warming, but if anything, for the sense of loss gone missing amid all this normal.

About the author

Stewart Cole is the author of the poetry collections Questions in Bed  (Goose Lane, 2012) and Soft Power  (Goose Lane, forthcoming fall 2019). He grew up in the Rideau Valley south of Ottawa and spent time living and writing in Victoria, Montréal, Fredericton, London, and Toronto. Now an expatriate in the U.S., he lives in the Midwest, where he teaches at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh.