Poetry in a Global Box: Canada

Lesley Choyce

Legend

When I was three years old
and my father was building our house--
nothing there yet but a skeleton of studs
and empty air,
I climbed the ladder to the not yet attic
and crawled along a joist
just wide enough for infant knees
until I was discovered
in the centre of a would be home
with mortality singing along my skin
and a cold concrete basement below.

All I had going for me (as usual)
was blind optimism and a sense of balance
like a bright idea not quite yet lost.
Then, somehow, before the darkness found me out,
my father was aloft,
too scared to shout my name
or make me move.
I think he almost tripped in fear,
a man whose feet could dance through work,
while I just smiled, expecting praise
and found, instead, a painful price
of angry hands that spanked me back
into a world of safe and love
before the time of further years
of higher climbs to narrow beams
with legs less sure at every step
and darker depths below us all.

© by Lesley Choyce

Victoria, B.C.: Ekstasis Editions, 1998.

ISBN: 1-896860-30-3