The Longest Road

I'm standing at a window I'm pressed against the past I'm looking on in black and white Through the eyes of photographs And I'm falling into faces Cultivated smiles Two dimensional Je me souviens Canada Out of Gastown in the morning On a train in '69 Into the arc-weld of the rising sun We left the coast behind And the wheels rolled in a rhythm And I heard in them for the first time The endless song of traveling out of Canada Oh Canada The longest road I've known Paved with the kind of broken hearts That lead to broken homes Looking backwards I remember The cracks in all the paving stones And the distances I've traveled out of Canada Through the dog-days of the prairies The boundless sky above our heads My stepfather looked for Mounties In the streets of Winnipeg And he told them that my mother's love Had stole his heart away And we all stood there Posed for Polaroids of Canada Oh Canada The longest road I've known Paved with the kind of broken hearts That lead to broken homes Looking backwards I remember The cracks in all the paving stones And the distances I've traveled out of Canada I awoke wrapped in my mother's arms On the docks of Montreal The ships lit like Christmas And the moon a swollen ball When a sailor spoke of England I'd never felt so small I waited until the ocean Turned from emerald to grey The wind threshed the water And washed our wake away And the seagulls blew like words Back to the mouth of the St. Lawrence As we sailed out On The Empress of Canada Oh Canada The longest road I've known Paved with the kind of broken hearts That lead to broken homes Looking backwards I remember The cracks in all the paving stones And the distances I've traveled out of Canada The first country of my youth My heart was ever drawn to you Like a tongue to a broken tooth In a world where everyone was always leaving I was trying to keep my fingertips On Canada