We’d be sitting in an outer room
before dawn, and someone would say
“Who’s gonna wake Terry?”,
and usually Darrel would go in
and you’d hear this loud grumble
through the wall, then Darrel
would come back out
and we’d wait, and then we’d hear
this THUMP! THUMP! and Terry
would come out and say,
“WHAT ARE YOU GUYS SITTING
AROUND FOR, LET’S GET GOING!”
because there will come a mile
where he is too weak to brush a horsefly
from the bridge of his nose, his head on a stretcher pillow
ringed by news microphones, surrounded
by the indifference of trees;
and until then it’s about reaching out
and threading each day, each corner and milepost
at a time and pulling the land in close;
there’s a bottle of Atlantic water
from Come-By-Chance Newfoundland
somewhere in the tour van
ten feet back and god willing
for every two steps Terry takes
towards Vancouver, he hops twice
with his real leg in order to give
the artificial one time
to swing through; “I don’t run
a normal technical”, he says over the motel phone
to a Montreal radio host, his voice the grand
and rich monotone of the road; he is becoming
the land through which he runs;
a doctor in Hamilton says the residual limb
nor longer fits into the bucket of his prosthesis,
he is expansive, becoming the places
where photos will never do justice,
in every Canadian brain, however, Terry
is a Polaroid: White tee-shirt, face both red
and sun-gloried and hair crowned by bright blue;
we are blinded
by his grandness; in fact; in Toronto when says
“If I don’t make it, keep trying”,we think
he’s just being a poet;
today, far from
his statue near Thunder Bay, the last milepost
he was able to thread sits off the shoulder
of the Trans Canada, the switchgrass mowed
by a local who was a boy when
Terry laid down and told the country
what we already knew: “If there is any way
I can get out here again
and finish it again I will.”
Photo by Laya Clode on Unsplash
