Camber

by Don McKay

  For the facts are scarce

  and secretive. Who is able to identify

  the man in metamorphosis, becoming

  half-bird on the Coldstream Road? The boy reports

  a falcon’s beak both hooked and toothed, the fingers spreading,

  lengthening into a vulture’s fringe, the cold eye

  glaring as he lifts off from the road: look, look,

  come quick!

  Who sits inside and fails to hear?

  What can he be doing?

  Why is he so deaf?

  But on another night a huge, hunched, crested

  multicoloured bird, a sort of cross between eagle

  and macaw, sits, sinister and gorgeous,

  on our mailbox.

  Now we know what happens to the letters we do not receive

  from royalty, and from our secret lovers

  pining in the chaste apartments of the waking world.

  SIMPLY BECAUSE LIGHT

  is falling a certain way through the dining-room window

  I want to lapse in speech on the balcony, sprawl

  in a lawn chair watching

  how the shadow shoves it up the hospital wall until

  it winks so long from the top-floor windows, float

  words like maple keys on thick

  and sleepy air.

  I want memories that germinate, the things

  we both thought when your mother

  fell and cut her knee that time I helped her from the car,

  the fight in the hotel in Edinburgh, other

  fights and hotels we have known I want

  the caterpillar to stop eating the thick

  leaf of the evening I want

  the kids to sit and reach inside themselves

  to wonder at the seed they were.

  I want to spread the shed years on us

  as a mulch I want

  unfoldings in my head like fast-growing plants in an old

  Walt Disney movie about spring, do you remember?

  Do you remember?

  Simply because of this

  I am bugging your ass in the kitchen

  disparaging the dishes, slamming cupboards, flicking

  bits of old no-longer-titled movies at you like the

  foam from the detergent just to make you say

  for christ’s sake let’s go have a beer

  on the balcony instead of –

  clip clop

  I’ll uncap them

  and we will.

  SPARROWS

  A movable ghetto,

  bickering on the feeder: suddenly

  a Blue Jay, they

  scatter to the currant bushes and

  regather: then to

  jabber back, hardy

  and unkillable clichés

  chirping to beat the band

  (while deep inside cacophony

  their group mind takes the microphone:

  non, je ne regrette rien, le grand

  trombone du vent the wintry

  dicta, enfin let the

  space between our voices be my nom de plume).

  ALIAS ROCK DOVE, ALIAS HOLY GHOST

  How come you don’t see more dead pigeons?

  Because when they die their bodies turn to lost gloves

  and get swept up by the city sweepers. Even so

  their soft inconsequence can sabotage a jumbo jet

  the way a flock of empty details

  devastates a marriage.

  Someone down the hall is working on an epic cough.

  Another makes it to the bathroom

  yet again, groping past my door. All night

  the senile plumbing interviews itself: some war or other.

  The faint sweet smell of must.

  Along the ledges of the parking garage they flutter

  wanly as the grey-blue residue of nightmares.

  Softness of bruises, of sponges

  sopping up exhaust.

  City poets try to read their tracks along the windowsill for some

  announcement. Such as our concrete palaces

  have the consistency of cake. Such as

  Metropolis of Crumbs. Such as

  Save us, Christ, the poor sons of bitches.

  GYNAECOLOGY

  He is conscious of his boots and dirty parka

  and the superficiality of chat.

  Women trundle I.V. trolleys slowly

  down the corridor, flourishing clear bags of plasma,

  emblems of the perfect womb.

  A more than hospital softness. Sadness

  of undone beginnings. Here, he thinks

  we’re earlier than virgin

  nakeder than nude.

  Sex, a pair of shoes, is left beside the elevator.

  Talk of weather: freezing rain,

  could be snow tonight.

  Symptoms of the world.

  What can he say?

  He leaves some tapes of poetry

  to pour through headphones into her ears thinking

  plasma

  matter

  feather

  energy

  chickadee

  OUR LAST BLACK CAT

  was the shadow of another cat

  he couldn’t catch, though he slid through his days

  without abrasion, unsurprised, surprising

  everybody else, appearing

  at your elbow as a sudden

  hole in your attention yet

  bored with his good looks and flowing

  into motion he attacked his sleeping

  sister licked cigar ash chased the squirrels once

  he tried to screw a pumpkin surely

  there is more to life.

  Even in repose his eyes were cigarettes of wrath

  burning into the feline condition

  which enclosed him like an egg –

  until at last he was surprised by a car

  on Cheapside Street and his life turned

  jerky as a slideshow.

  Now we look him up in memory under lithe:

  flexible limber pliant supple:

  stiff with attributes.

  ON SEEING THE FIRST TURKEY VULTURES OF SPRING

  Some claim forepangs in their shoulder blades, others

  that the light grows dim, or else

  (too many Westerns) that air

  winces to a single long drawn minor chord.

  Serene, décolletés, unflappably

  they circle, oval

  and parabola,

  an elegance, a laziness

  that masks the naked ache of appetite

  as distance masks the outrage that their heads are wounds.

  Calling nothing, building no nests,

  they lay their eggs on rock.

  Everywhere they see through to the end (he shoots

  her lover, dynamites the mine, leaves town),

  eliminating spring as so much juice.

  The Great Southwestern Ontario

  Desert offers its hors d’oeuvres.

  LONGING:

  a term for radical unwinding of the heart, e.g.

  an angel

  calling his dog, a cardinal

  whistling in the poplars plucks a dangling

  heartstring in his beak and

  flies off somewhere, carelessly

  in Welsh

  across the clothesline

  bleeding into the trees

  A TOAST TO THE BALTIMORE ORIOLE

  Here’s to your good looks and the neat way you shit

  with a brisk bob like a curtsey, easy as song.

  Here’s to your song, which,

  though “neither rhythmical nor musical” (The Birds of Canada),

  relieves me of all speech and never deals with what is past,

  or passing, or to come.

  And, as a monument to the sturdy fragile woven

  scrotum of your nest,

  I hereby dedicate baseball.

  ADAGIO FOR A FALLEN SP
ARROW

  In the bleak midwinter

  frosty wind made moan

  earth was hard as iron

  water like a stone

  Sparrows burning

  bright bright bright against the wind

  resemble this item, this frozen

  lump on the floor of my garage, as fire

  resembles ash:

  not much.

  A body to dispose of,

  probably one I’ve fed all winter, now

  a sort of weightless fact,

  an effortless repudiation of the whole shebang.

  I’d like to toss it in the garbage can but can’t let go

  so easily. I’d bury it

  but ground is steel

  and hard to find. Cremation?

  Much too big a deal, too rich and bardic

  too much like an ode. Why not simply splurge

  and get it stuffed, perch it proudly on the shelf

  with Keats and Shelley and The Birds of Canada?

  But when at last

  I bury it beneath three feet of snow

  there is nothing to be said.

  It’s very cold.

  The air

  has turned its edge

  against us.

  My bones

  are an antenna picking up

  arthritis, wordless keening of the dead.

  So, sparrow, before drifting snow

  reclaims this place for placelessness, I mark your grave

  with four sticks broken from the walnut tree:

  one for your fierce heart

  one for your bright eye

  one for the shit you shat upon my windshield

  while exercising squatters’ rights in my garage

  and one to tell the turkey vultures where your thawing body lies

  when they return next spring to gather you

  into the circling ferment of themselves.

  And my last wish: that they do

  before the cat discovers you and eats you, throwing up,

  as usual, beside the wicker basket in the upstairs hall.

  “THE BELLIES OF FALLEN BREATHING SPARROWS”

  Some things can’t be praised enough, among them

  breasts and birds

  who have cohabited so long in metaphor

  most folks think of them as married.

  Not only that, but

  when you slide your shirt (the striped one) off

  the inside of my head is lined with down

  like a Blackburnian warbler’s nest,

  the exterior of which is often rough and twiggy

  in appearance.

  And as the shirt snags, hesitates, and then

  lets go, I know exactly why he warbles as he does,

  which is zip zip zip zip zeee

  chickety chickety chickety chick.

  The man who wrote “twin alabaster mounds”

  should have spent more time outdoors

  instead of browsing in that musty old museum where

  he pissed away his youth.

  A BARBED-WIRE FENCE MEDITATES UPON THE GOLDFINCH

  More than the shortest distance

  between points, we are

  the Stradivarius of work.

  We make the meadow meadow, make it

  mean, make it yours, but till the last

  insurance policy is cashed in we will

  never be immune to this

  exquisite cruelty:

  that the knots in all our posts remember limbs

  they nested and were busy in and danced per-

  chic-o-ree their loops between,

  that the fury of their playfulness persists

  in amputated roots.

  Remember us

  next time the little yellow bastards lilt

  across your windshield. No one

  no one is above the law.

  FIELD MARKS (2)

  just like you and me but

  cageless, likes fresh air and

  wants to be his longing.

  Wears extra eyes around his neck, his mind

  pokes out his ears the way an Irish Setter’s nose

  pokes out a station-wagon window.

  His heart is suet. He would be a bird book full of

  lavish illustrations with a text of metaphor.

  He would know but still

  be slippery in time. He would eat crow. He becomes

  hyperbole, an egghead who spends days attempting to compare the

  shape and texture of her thigh to a snowy egret’s neck, elegant

  and all too seldom seen in Southern Ontario.

  He utters absolutes he instantly forgets. Because

  the swallow is intention in a fluid state it is

  impossible for it to “miss.” On the other

  hand a swallow’s evening has been usefully compared

  to a book comprised entirely of errata slips.

  He wings it.

  KESTRELS

  The name “Sparrow hawk” is unfair to this handsome and beneficial little falcon.

  – The Birds of Canada

  1.

  unfurl from the hydro wire, beat

  con brio out across the field and

  hover, marshalling the moment, these

  gestures of our slender hostess,

  ushering her guests into the dining room

  2.

  sprung rhythm and

  surprises, enharmonic change directions simply

  step outside and let the earth turn

  underneath, trapdoors, new lungs, missing bits

  of time, plump familiar pods go

  pop in your mind you learn not

  principles of flight but how to fall, you learn

  pity for that paraplegic bird, the heart

  3.

  to watch by the roadside singing killy killy killy,

  plumaged like a tasteful parrot,

  to have a repertoire of moves so clean their edge is

  the frontier of nothing

  to be sudden to send

  postcards of distance which arrive in nicks of time

  to open letters with a knife

  WHITE PINE

  In our dance philosophy we say: Think before you move.

  – The Techniques of Isadora Duncan

  Watch me.

  This is how I walk

  softly and carry a sharp stick

  lightly as a paintbrush. This is how I

  mill the slow

  momentum of the earth how I

  turn its turning to my

  reaching how I

  swirl up to a point

  releasing silent pings among the birdsongs.

  And this is how I wear my maidenhair

  to stroll the slope, how I invite

  your eye to know the smoothness of my limbs’

  articulations, elbows, armpits

  backs of knees

  lovelier than which I think that you will never see.

  TO SING AND FEED

  among the spruce: Bach

  would put this evening on the cello

  and chew it.

  You would feel the long strokes

  bite and sweep, everything

  curve away, arching back

  against the bow.

  You would know the end before the end

  would understand the Red-winged blackbirds calling

  konkeree konkeree the sexual

  buzz the silver

  falling whistle hanging from the top spines of the spruce

  like tinsel.

  You would dwell in imminence.

  You would arrive home empty

  covered with burrs

  ready

  MOURNING DOVES

  In the dim unwritten folklore of the heart

  they are the soft grey sisters

  muting the cries of their brother, the Great Horned Owl, to

  woe

  woe

  woe for every victim, calling,


  recalling the Passenger Pigeons who were much as they

  but rosy-breasted, brighter-eyed, amoureuse, and bigger.

  AUGUST

  Everything is full but she

  keeps pumping on the inside

  chintzing up the outside till her month becomes

  a regular rococo whorehouse in an expanding economy.

  Back and forth salaam salaam the sprinklers

  graze and pray on plush

  carpets of grass, beer becomes sweat, the heavy

  air surrounds, mothers us to immobility, the mind

  melts, the elements

  slump, four fat uncles in their lawn chairs, while the flesh

  well the flesh just ambles into town to get drunk

  with the ball players.

  We knew this ripeness and we knew

  her smiling, solitary

  reaper.

  The shiver slid

  beneath the sunburn with the fatal

  rightness of a shift to minor key:

  she loved him, she dressed up in her gypsy best,

  she left.

  LISTEN AT THE EDGE

  At the edge of firelight

  where the earth is cradled in soft

  black gloves filled with unknown hands, where

  every word is shadowed by its animal, our ears

  are empty auditoria for

  scritch scritch scritch rr-ronk the

  shh uh shh of greater

  anonymities the little

  brouhahas that won’t lie still for type

  and die

  applauseless,

  humus to our talking. Listen

  while they peck like enzymes, eat

  the information from our voices, scritch

  and whip-poor-will and peent, o