In the wide mouth of the Sixteen-Mile Creek,
the spring ice has flowed and broken up.
Seagulls lope through the sky above as the hum
of town life drifts down to the shore.
There, figures walk slowly, holding hands
in black clothes, recalling the action of days
while thoughts from night’s two edges remain
shadowed by the lighthouse at the end of the pier.
Yet this green-grey shore is still the same,

here where Navy Street climbs slightly to the old centre,
past tennis courts, and yachts, and welcoming homes
in need of paint, blue spruce and pine fronting their yards.
The streetlights shudder and treetops bend:
wind is sweeping overhead, busting off the lake,
arriving wild in Oakville, growing slow and tame.
By Church and Robinson it skirts downtown,
past the cafes, giftshops for kids and pet-food stores,
chocolate displays, and two boutiques for yarn,
with clean cement sidewalks and parklettes
bearing historical names on patches of green.

Behind the built-up facades, the lake stretches,
miles and miles of emerald grey, and sailboats’
white triangles look back on undercut, collapsing cliffs
and muscular, bulwarked seawalls. At night, lights
of Hamilton, highways and refineries, and eastward,
distant pinpricked beacons atop the cn Tower.
Leaving the valley of the Sixteen-Mile, cars roll
on their way to ramps and malls and timely go trains,
through the haze of warehouses and depots along the q-e
to the white boxes of Ford on a hill, and beyond,
Winston Churchill Boulevard. All this time,
winter or summer, the lake-water gleams,
white stars on grey and blue, calling to sailors
and ghosts of deer, leaping on Tannery Hill.

Often at full moon, the teenagers
gather to smoke under the bridge, satirical trolls
making fun of their world: Jokeville, No Hopeville.
Sons of investment bankers, daughters of physicians,
they’re embarrassed to admit the opposite, that the town
was set up to win, by years of good stewardship, wealth
and location. Before dawn, the teens long gone,
small owls make their final run, picking off mice
venturing to the riverside for snacks of chrysalides.

The wind picks up. Columns of air kilometres high
heat the high atmosphere, spilling coldness down
as the sun hits Lakeshore Road, toothing morning.
The pizza joint sits dusty and still. In the yoga gym
with tinted windows, the stale sweat stirs. In the lot
of gravestones and monuments, the sparrows gather
as delivery of fish and bread in the alleys begins.
Through little holes in walls, oubliettes in the walk,
the slam of trays and smells of cooking come.
In the frozen-yogourt shop just past the core,
a franchise owner in a lopsided swivel chair
assesses her prospects beside industrial refrigerators

while, glancing up from flowerbeds, a crew of workers
nods to another in a passing streetsweeper.
An acrid taste hits the tongue: roofers burn acetylene
as a saw whines, two tones, catching wood again
and again. The private schools will open, but not today,
today the creek is full of paddlers, the dangle
of Olympic gold just beyond their straining necks.
On the bank, an old lady and her terrier stop to watch
the smooth crews parting the liquid calm.
Retirees with bad knees in ragged dressing gowns
bend to pick up papers tossed by cycling newsboys
as coffee thunders quietly and toast pops, indoors.

Church bells will ring, but not yet. Two bleary drinkers
must wake in their car, where they bundled up
after last call, grew sick, and passed out in the cold.
I remember it all, I tell myself. Fake ids, Brewer’s Retail,
orange juice and vodka, Aerosmith on the jukebox,
the man at the Murray House who fell from the roof.
In the library, the empty reading chairs glow, ignoring all,
while the smiling faces of actors in this season’s plays
stare out crazily from posters in the theatre foyer.
If one looked up now, a hawk would be there, circling,
hoping to catch a starling hissing a raspberry, unawares,
as a boy holds his mother’s hand inside the bank,
and words mumbled, under the breath, of withdrawals –
a cavernous, single room, the only sound a ticking clock.