Men in earth-dark fabrics glide on the land,
women in colours glimmer,
their hems in the furrows folding.
Children festoon the hayricks,
by squinted eye and outstretched knuckle surveying the fields into grids.
They come, and wheat moves like weeds to the forest.
Trees become timbers.
Riverbed clays congeal into bricks.
Sparrow-trails and wren-runs harden into high bridges.
A high-grid riveter
fits north to south, north to south, north to south
until the black bridge closes the valley.
He scampers girder to girder in his steel-spun net,
collecting the catch of the day:
evergreen mists of morning,
flashing clouds of evening,
and high-noon grins of brotherhood among the men.
Nearby, a journeyman layer of tiles pauses.
He turns to his work behind him, the diminishing rows,
and by squinted eye and outstretched knuckle he surveys
beyond the narrowest rows,
beyond the makeshift neighbourhoods,
beyond the undulating prairie and tabling dryland,
beyond the granite outcrops and limestone ledges.
He casts the net of his mind's meridians
over ancient monuments and modern anomalies.
He pulls on the net and draws into his Edmonton palms
the vanishing point of all that has gone before:
the grubbing temples, the parabolic gutters,
the wharves, the wars,
the prayers, the prairies,
the truths and the most intricate evasions of truth;
and these are his tiles.
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