This was the river hiked dreaming upstream
dropping gear and then clothing for the full

brown pull of surrendered connection, deliverance.
Starting down-hill in Lillooet, the picnic table

puddled with yesterday’s socked-in drizzle (dark
we drove up in) re-tweets in patches an opening

gleam in the sky onto sandbar, bench-lands.
From muddled movement, mud,

to step unexpectedly into refreshment, swirled
palette of eddy-boil, gravels and boulders, sure-

footed map of the island adjacent picked
up in a seed-potato of pebble! Pine

root and cacti are hugging the clay-banks
and sluices. Bunch-grass. Bird’s nest

in a small tree’s last gold
leaves. Scenes past season in new amber.

Contentment. Tormented a year since
it cannot be our hurt earth holds

consolation (limitless!) out to us
still. But is. Naïve to believe it. But is

(old guess) my sole way forward, suspension-
bridge under repair just over there.



John Pass’s poems have appeared in 19 books and chapbooks in Canada, and in magazines in the US, the UK, Ireland and the Czech Republic. He won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry in 2006 for Stumbling in the Bloom and the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize (BC Book Award) in 2012 for crawlspace. His latest book is Forecast: Selected Early Poems 1970 – 1990 (Harbour 2015). In 2016 “Margined Burying Beetle” from a new sequence, “Creation of the Animals” won the Malahat Review’s Open Season Award.

Photo credits: all images of the Fraser River at Lillooet by John Pass.