bodyguard for the longeststreetintheworldthatisYongestreet ending only in our Ontario Lake District. Bank of Montreal, at that!
with its back square upon me, the squat cube of our beer baron’s art centre: O’Keefe
overtopping all these, the soft-nosed phallicity of Bank of Commerce — circumspect, uncircumcised — 32 stories of Canadian self-satisfaction
the new National Trust tower, well below
& below again, prickly up these closed commercial shops, the spired incisions of the old City of Churches — Saints James & Michael &Metropole
&, last link with the old city, Osgoode aside, St-Lawrence-Market- where-Jenny-Lind-sang
pinched by the Victorian gabling from Jarvis Street East … even gables in Toronto are Presbyterian spinsters’ eyes on my wayward trainside
Gooderham ’n Worts stone distillery — 1832: THERE is the REAL HOY culture … Honest Ontario Yeoman — Hoyman — none of this nostalgic log cabin cult … but cubic yards of squared stonework — behind it, the high windows and gratuitous lantern of Tuscan Revival blocks (if only they would repaint these!)
a minute, a panorama of 2 centuries passed … to the free flowing muck of the Don River — where Founding-Governor Simcoe’s wife fished for fresh salmon! What could she think now of this shit-sluice?
Anal canal for 2 million congested citizens! And all the valleyside of it superways with some guilty pretence at parkland
squat huddle of houses … one, two, five, seven minutes … the Emancipated Methodist Culture of Canada! … Cdn squatters — our national smugliness — small, stolid bungalows; unlike anything in the Yewnited States — smaller, thicker, squalider. Someday we’ll clear the land of these affluent slums — in revenge for the lost White Pine we cleared first to house them….
a trickle of land … apologetic almost — extinct landscape!
redbrick belfry & white cornicings cuddle me kinetic to the land for spring — of course: the Church at Dunbarton — rural Ontario Ecclesiological — as specifically Ontario as the French-Cdn parish church is Québec … want to shout the news out to the traincar … but am silenced by the sight of she-man opposite me
glut of bungalettes again — more modern now
the Ugliest City in Ontario — easy laureate: Oshawa — cartown
Queen Anne’s Lace, Milkweed pod, St. John’s Wort … all the sun flushed earthenware of Ontario winter garden of the open fields (want to shout — “do you see these? — look — our winter garden …” but the eyes in front of me are deaf) — snow-pocked field furrows … sudden woodland shimmers bronze of wintered beechleaves
at horizon spruce palisade (sharp eyes, like those spinster gables!) alerts me to the orchard that must arrive & cedar hedge, overgrown, and hip-rooved bulky barn, stone root house, & same stone foundations to the blockhouse home red-and-white brick trimmed that completes this Chateau-fort of our HOYman. Massive, impenetrable, us! Nowhere else in our wide bloody world but Ontario … Southern Ontario: Home — damn it, and blessings
more bungalows distress the site — unworthy, unworthy — God — UNWORTHY offspring
Spiresides — Port Hope … & on the knoll behind, overlording the factories beneath its notice almost but not quite, Cdn Eton (for better and for worse) — Trinity College School — vestige of the disestablished upper Canadian Anglican Genteel State (but choose your enemy then — this … or the bungalettes! Sweet choice.)
that impasse resolves sudden with the grace notes in conscientiously squared lines between the great cubed fieldstones that amass an eternal yeoman stone Georgian home — Canadian Fabergé, these stone houses: cameos out of rich stone-sown earth to clear those near generations thrust abruptly by now to be restituted in only a retroactive nostalgia for tourists and the New Nation: as though killed for a better Resurrection. Each one still a gem — legacy rebuking the preflab culture around it … Cobourg … & now the dark.
How well I know this route — our Ontario Front, Niagara to Montreal — 500 miles of us. Ontario Foundation line, and front door to our estate of ½ a million square miles. In each town, village, still, a relative a memory, an echo of community lost under bulldozer … Cobourg — with its magniloquent Court House — New England Meeting House interior compounded with British Raj stonework exterior. Ontario!
Belleville & Trenton … where the stonework changes from fieldstone to limestoniness … from freckles to garrison grey. & the Trent waterway debouches from Georgian Bay into Lake Ontario. Where Champlain canoed (idiot adventurer!) four centuries ago to found our empire. Outside the window, in that dark, all my entrails rolling under us now —
the great slice of limestone into Kingston, that grey canyon cut by the highway down into the valley of the old capital town of the Canadas — Kingston … where I walked that afternoon in November — to have the pleasure of seeing that unsung Ontario Trinity … St.Andrew’s Presbytery — the best of Ontario stonework; Elizabeth Cottage — the loveliest Walter Scott gothic; & (aptly Anglican) Okill’s Folly — the most splendiferous Regency manor — now the residence of the Principal of Queen’s Univ … all within a few hundred yards of each other — & was as joyous as if I had walked from La Place de la Concorde to the Louvre to La Sainte Chapelle; & had wanted to take a whip to the passers-by who didn’t make obeisance to these splendours.& why not — infraction against beauty is a crime against the state!
Of course the Penitentiary … Child’s King Arthur come ironically true, with its busy turrets … & the Military College (dare one still call it “Royal” — because that too will go soon enough — we’ll rechristen it the Federal Military College … surreptitiously! — and then by Order-in-Council)
the old #2 route thence to Ganonoque’s Golden Apple — laden with stonehouses and flowers spurting out of stone roadcut canyons …. & that day, it was February 28, when my wife & I sunbathed on the front porch of the deserted summer cottage, over the Thousand Islands, after returning from Amurrica — laughing at the legend of the frozen North (the look on the mongrel dog’s face, & then his master’s, when he saw us there!) The Ontario Front … Giant sentinel Mulleins stalking the land still in dried khaki above the white field beds. I know just where the climax oak and the hickory start again, near Kingston
… Oh, out that window is all of me underfoot. Out that window is inside me,
