The green buoy, yards from shore, still floats
where they found you.
Eight days lost, overturned and bloated
when men tethered you away, at arm's length.
In those shallows, someone deemed you unseaworthy
with a hole in your left brow, just above the water stain.
A coil of fishing line wrapped round your leg.
We would rather remember where you carried us
Past sawed stumps and loggerheads to where
we could embrace that pine, the sky and the far shore.
You ransomed us, a country thought grey and unworthy of paint.
In Toronto, in a rented dock-shed, just inside the door
your friends came upon the West Wind
wet and still waiting, at Yonge and Bloor.
We rebury you in two places, again, like treasure.
Outside a low church fence or up the lakeside trail
hastily, among the touch-me-nots.