Widowmaker

When you live with love you live with worry
or so I've heard
if that's what you said
when he took sick
and you were taken ill yourself
when he took a heart attack
you said he'd had a widowmaker
the kind that a quadruple bypass won't fix
without a pacemaker

and that time he said
he didn't know what he was equal to
for the first time
Eugene Forsey was a Meighan conservative

before a Rhodes Scholarship
made him a democratic socialist
and a labour organizer
who could forget the League for Reconstruction
and the CCF
he was the son of the Grand Bank
in the Newfoundland Colony
and the grandson of a printer
who made the stationery for John A. MacDonald
then in the East Block

and when he talked to us
he was a Senator himself
who objected to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms
not because he didn't feel those things were worth protecting
but because he regretted
the passing of the propriety
that made people respect others
short of being ordered
by the law

later they named a park after him

where the elderly sit

waiting for the bus

and remembering times

when someone might have sat down next to them

and talked to them

not of comrades and kings

but of thirsty words and lame legs

and the time

daughters visited

upon their child's birth.