IT'S CHARGED WITH MY BROTHER'S KARMA HE SAID

IT’S CHARGED WITH MY BROTHER’S KARMA HE SAID

It’s charged with my brother’s karma he said

as he broke the shotgun

like the trunk of a young ironwood

and looked inside as if he

fully expected to surprise something funny

going on behind his back in both barrels

then plunked it down on the table

as if he were laying down

hard cold cash for something.

He took his life with it.

I’ll do the same when my time comes.

And how will you know when that will be? I asked

as he took a long merciless sip of Olde Crow Whiskey.

If you got to ask you’d pass right by it

even if I told you where it’s at.

And that was that

as the bottle thumped down on the table

like an adamant gavel.

I didn’t press the point.

I didn’t ask for a starmap.

I let it rest like most of his ancestors

in a cemetery up near Northbrook

Highway 7 runs through

on your way to Peterborough

past Tweed where Elvis Presley lives.

Earlier in the day I had walked

among the gravestones

of two tribal backwoods families

prodigiously askew and fabulously lonely

sinking into the long wet-haired disorderly grass

indecently green for this time of year,

unkempt dandelions and rusty Indian paintbrush

the colour of cars in the backfields of l950

lying side by side

like angry chequers swept off the board

not one in ten of which

died a natural death.

Hangings, suicides, tragic accidents,

unsolved murders

that everyone’s related to

for miles around in the smokey grey woods

watching from a distance,

bodies hanging from barn rafters,

crushed under overturned tractors,

blood spatter on the bedroom walls

that had seen them conceived and born

and a haemorrhage like the scattered petals

of a single red rose left on the mattress

when the time came to know what hour it was.

I wanted to ask him

but I didn’t want to tread on sacred ground,

as a rosary of Canada geese passed south

appearing through the kitchen window

like the flint knappings of a stone arrow

November was carving high over head.

When it came time for him to depart

did he put the shotgun up to his mouth

or his heart?

PATRICK WHITE