A Place to buy Daffodils

The woman in the flower stall is off today.

The green metal cabinets are squeezed shut and there is

A pre-spring breeze wafting across the cobble street.

Nobody wants flowers on Sunday except for me.

I walk to the corner to pick up my prescription,

I walk to the farther one so I have an excuse to

chat with the pharmacist in English. Say what you will

But to speak your own language is to have ointment

Caressed over your gaping raw wounds by the patient

hands of a Silent Generation Woman.

Speaking English is high on my list of things I took for granted,

it sits between "knowing who the fuck I am"

and a citizenship. Also on that list is Margaret Atwood

("can you believe we are From The Same City?").

So is walking down Queen Street West, wild blueberry scones

covered in sugar crystals from Jimmy's,

And the dove-grey geese bobbing over lake Ontario.

Days like this I think I am Solzhenitsyn,

except he was exiled by the commies and I volunteered for mine.

Part moral exile, because capitalism was speeding up

My soul rot. Part blind loyalty which led me to an endless plain.

Once you see clearly, returning uncritically is impossible,

he once wrote. But in the end we both ended up cold.

My name here is a shape that people's mouths make.

Back home it meant come inside, we waited, tea's on.

If you leave, leave because this doesn’t feel alive enough for you —

not because you’ve decided you’re not worth flowers.

Tonight I will write to my friends in Toronto

and I will have a fleeting urge to walk through Kensington.

It is only 11am there right now and I'm

sure there are plenty of places to buy young daffodils.

I will crush the wish under my heel like a cigarette stub.

Canada: I thought I’d never get over it.

Turns out you just learn to live beside it.