Always I searched her eyes for tribal mystery,
some hint of flint or arrow,
rummaged her closet for birch bark memory
or a string of beads.

I would listen, crouched
in the narrow, warped hallway
while she knelt within the stifling perfume
of her old woman's room
reciting The Lord's Prayer
once in English,once in Cree.

I wanted to hear the worship
of different deities,
turtle shell rattles and dancing moccasins,
sweet smoke and strong medicine
invoking spirits from the green shadows
of some irrevocable tract of forest.

She spoke only of her trips to Toronto
opening a withered palm
to show me a subway token
while I studied her hand for the grain of a paddle.

I watched the funeral guests
hoping for an elder-warrior
with shoulder-length grey hair
and an eagle feather to lay on her dead breast
but there was only department store suits,
and the stink of mothballs dipped in cologne
and cigarette ashes three inches long.

I had asked for words from the language
she had been forbidden to speak
and I scribbled lists of them
on little pieces of paper.
From time to time I found one
crammed in a jacket pocket,
a broken chain of nouns and verbs
I was trying to link back to some solid point
in her distint, nebulous past.
I waited for my complexion to darken
wished for some emblem tattooed a blessing
on the pale frustration of my skin.

Her journey out of the north
was my talisman but she had left
her rituals and her past in the turbulent river
dropped into the foam like so much tobacco.
All that was left was a dream
about a young Cree girl
loading a canoe on a morning
of mist and white water.
I see her push away from the shore
begin to stroke against the current
and when she looks back
there is a bundle forgotten on the rocky beach;
a package that was meant for me.

Ian McCulloch, North Bay, Ontario.