Migration: C. P. R. -Margaret Atwood i Escaping from allegories in the misty east, where inherited events barnacle on the mind; where every gloved handshake might be a finger pointing; you can't look in store windows without seeing reflections/remnants of privateer bones or methodist grandfathers with jaws carved as wood pulpits warning of the old evil; where not-quite- forgotten histories make the boards of lineal frame farmhouses rotten the fishermen sit all day on old wharves facing neither sea- wards nor inland, mending and untangling their old nets of thought and language is the law we ran west wanting a place of absolute unformed beginning (the train an ark upheld on the brain's darkness) but the inner lakes reminded us too much of ancient oceans first flood: blood- enemy and substance (was our train like an ark or like a seasnake? and the prairies were so nearly empty as prehistory that each of the few solid objects took some great implication, hidden but more sudden than a signpost (like an inscribed shard, broken bowl dug at a desert level where they thought no man had been, or a burned bone) (every dwarf tree portentous with twisted wisdom, though we knew no apples grew there and that shape, gazing at nothing by a hooftrampled streamside: it could have been a centaur) and even the mountains at the approach, were conical, iconic again: (tents in the desert?  triangular ships?  towers?  breasts? words) again these barriers		ii Once in the pass, the steep faulted gorges were at last real: we tossed our eastern suitcases from the caboose and all our baggage overboard left in our wake along the tracks and (we saw) our train became only a train, in real danger of falling; strained speechless through those new mountains we stepped unbound into what a free emerging on the raw streets and hills without meaning always creeping up behind us (that cold touch on the shoulder) our faces scraped as blank as we could wish them (but needing new houses, new dishes, new husks) iii There are more secondhand stores here than we expected: though we brought nothing with us (we thought) we have begun to unpack. A residual brass bedstead scratched with the initials of generic brides and grooms; chipped squat teapots: old totemic mothers; a boxful of used hats. In the forest, even apart from the trodden paths, we can tell (from the sawn fistumps) that many have passed the same way some time before this (hieroglyphics carved in the bark) Things here grow from the grounds too insistently green to seem spontaneous. (My skeletons, I think, will be still in the windows when I look, as well as the books and the index- fingered gloves.) There is also a sea that refuses to stay in the harbour: becomes opaque air or throws brown seaweeds like small drowned hands up on these shores (the fishermen are casting their nets here as well) and blunted mountains rolling        (the first whales maybe?) in the inescapable mists.