Spring in the sugar shack,
my child’s eyes watch my uncle drag
a wooden spoon through a boiling tub of maple sap,
clearing the steam,
exposing the current of a golden-yellow liquid below.
Late that summer,
riding my bicycle through the wheat fields,
the wheat grain flowing like an ocean current
in the gentle breeze,
golden-yellow like the maple sap,
and I imagine I am a wooden spoon.
I wrote that poem last week and
I was pretty sure I knew what I meant to say,
but now it’s a week later and I think
the meaning is something else.
I am the Creator.
I wrote the poem to mean something.
But now, I am the Viewer.
I think it means something else.
I can’t even remember what I thought it meant a week ago.
If the meaning keeps changing for me,
perhaps it will eventually become meaning-less.
For some, I’m sure, it already has.
One day, someone might ask me
how I came up with the idea of the
imagery of the sugar shack and the wheat field.
I will probably make up a story about
how I was comparing and connecting
two childhood memories.
That would be a safe response.
But it would be fiction.
The truth is,
I have never even been to a sugar shack that I recall,
nor have I ridden my bicycle through a wheat field.
Never mind that a wheat field and a sugar shack
are clichés about Canadian rural living.
Frankly, I don’t even know if the colour of boiling maple sap
is actually golden-yellow.
It could be black for all I know.
And maybe stirring a vat of boiling maple sap isn’t even done.
Or if it is, maybe metal spoons are used instead of wooden spoons.
I have no idea.
It just popped into my head.
Well, there I go.
I’ve done it again.
I’ve already forgotten what that silly poem meant to me
even just five minutes ago.
I have no idea where the idea came from.
I have no idea what I hoped I would convey with the poem.
And I don’t know what it means to me now.
Tomorrow, I may interpret something romantic about the poem,
something about boyhood dreams,
about how children glide through the mysteries of life,
engaging in magical transformation,
sap to sugar,
seed to wheat.