In order to view this poem with the line breaks the author intended, we suggest reading it on a computer screen or in the landscape orientation on your phone or tablet.

Northern Canada
Mark Nemeth

His idea, he said, was that we’d drive
as far north through Canada as we could,
all the way to the end of the last road.
It would be him, me, my wife, his wife.
We’d take two cars, with an extra
spare tire and an axe strapped on the roof.
I unearthed my road atlas and we planned
our route, crossing the border in Montana,
up through Calgary and Whitehorse,
past mountain ranges we’d never heard of,
the stunted boreal trees and the flat tundra,
to the Mackenzie River delta at Tuktoyaktuk,
on the cold shore of the Artic Ocean.

I imagined the conversations on the road,
the things we’d each reveal
that we’d told only a few people before,
the silly car games, the bad meals in small towns,
the big argument we’d have
in a motel parking lot somewhere in the Yukon,
the handshakes and hugs two hours later.
I imagined the low sun at midnight,
the open highway through empty land.

The next time I saw him, I told him
yeah, let’s do it, this summer.
He mumbled a little and said money
was tight and he couldn’t do it this year,
and I knew then that it would never happen.

—
Mark Nemeth holds a Ph.D. in civil engineering and works as an engineer for a federal water management agency. His poetry has been published in Abandoned Mine, Last Leaves, and The Rockford Review. He lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Know anyone who might appreciate reading Mark’s poem?
Why not share the link to this page?

Have you read these poems:
Blowdown by Robert Brickhouse
From Up on the Porch by Anthony DeGregorio

Table of Contents