Over the clank and clink, the white bony plates your stare positioned in its cocoa, tobacco. The thousand times you told me not to, flashing out of the cones.  Throngs and thickets.  Sight.  Friday, bring me to Friday alongside of chicken shwarma; parsley, pasted garlic, worn tables and brittle windows with Toronto raising its concrete at me like hackles.  This stolen dinner, where I still loved you.

This city. Ours.  Still frozen.

I tell you that I’ve been dreaming of rare birds and monarchs.  The pull of gut, blood, bones, geography, tides. Whatever happened to stopping me while you could?   Trembling before chance, my Torontonian hangs back with Queen Street strung around his collar, like tithes, telling me.

Nothing.

So, I decorate the inside of his wallet with wings and surrender to the pull of roads.

I learn that migration is a solitary act.  It is an individual yearning, which wrenches us away from comfort.  I cross Lake Erie with pots and pans and battle worn, threadbare.  I am hanging onto the white plastic seat of this ferry, its smoothness working against me, as we pass above the shadows of shipwrecks.  History.  Bloodlines. What is nautical is for my father, found in the marine shops where he finds comfort.  Smooth white things and dials. The things of the sea.  I want so badly the wood boats in graves underneath me, so I may put them back across this passage.  Undrown them.  I want so badly to burrow back into the crease of your wool sweater in the fall, into the scent of crisp leaves, into the hearth of our apartment.  I learn that migration is a solitary act, and that without a lighthouse; the land of our mind becomes a compass.  The islands of my youth, dashed by dollar bills and vodka, passed over for larger more bruised horizons.  How I cannot seem to rest in the shores of you anymore.  I come here because I promised I would one day, in the meanwhile visiting other islands, hoping that they would compare.  I float above burial grounds, farmlands, mysteries.  The old, familiar pull of
harvest keeping my wings in flight.

This island, with its little girl climbs down into the dykes, and the creepy abandoned house in the thicket.  The way the blue lake hits the calm grey of boulders like a sea of coldness.  Lazy drives and Sundays spent treasuring away beach glass and old bottles in meadows.    Birds jumping out of trees with every movement and push of breath.  This island that I deeply promised to return to, like a lover.  Like a mother.  Marshes gurgling with frogs and snakes in the early morning driving slow through Fish point on my own dare.  Meadows and ruined wineries.  Hunting lodges.  Yearling pheasants.  Rifles.  Kites and old suckers from the Trading Post.  I return to you this body and apologize for the way it is claimed by other places.  I return here with a heart that is broken, but still an island of it’s own experience. 
The island of my father. 
Jars of glass.
Old keys that unlock me.