I TP FROM the low-roofed dockyard warehouses
U it rises blind and babylonian,
like something out of legend. Something seen
in a children’s colored book. Leviathan
swamped on our shore? The cliffs of some other river?
The blind ark lost and petrified?’ A cave
built to look innocent, by pirates? Or
some eastern tomb a traveled patron here makes local?
But even when known, it’s more than what it is:
for here, as in a Josephdream, bow down
the sheaves, the grains, the scruples of the sun
garnered for darkness; and Saskatchewan
is rolled like a rug of a thick and golden thread.
O prison of prairies, ship in whose galleys roll
sunshines like so many shaven heads,
waiting the bushel-burst out of the beached bastille!
Sometimes, it makes me think Arabian,
the grain picked up, like tic-tacs out of time,
first one; another; singly; one by one;
to save life. Sometimes, some other races claim
the twinship of my thought,-as the river stirs
restless in a white Caucasian sleep,
or, as in the steerage of the elevators,
the grains, Mongolian and crowded, dream.
A box-cement, hugeness, and rightangles
merely the sight of it leaning in my eyes
mixes up continents and makes a montage
of inconsequent time and uncontiguous space.
It’s because it’s bread. It’s because
bread is its theme, an absolute. Because
always this great box flowers over us
with all the colored faces of mankind.
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