by Don McKay
throat, husked in smoke and finely
muscled, play these on your jukebox
ohms of speech.
PAUSING BY MOONLIGHT BESIDE A FIELD OF DANDELIONS GONE TO SEED
Bygones, the many moons of the moon
catch and concentrate its light:
listen
the car ticks as it cools
rustle
absence of owls
everything thin, silver
virgin as Ophelia’s lingerie
adrift
no more
afternoons of running butter.
Gossip is dead.
Your next breath
triggers ten million peccadilloes.
THE TIRE SWING
The walnut turns granite
in fading light, the kids in silhouette
are winding up the tire swing to spin
one in it looking up, one on it
looking down, a brave new planet
torqued up to begin.
Behind the window I rehearse
how the earth will spin to chaos in his head, in hers
the slate sky swirl to a throat.
They pause, pure
potential in the jaws
of darkness poised to close, then
slow in the be
in the begin
in the beginning
in the engendering of energies that
rhymes them with their blurring world.
BLOOD
Sing to me softly.
Hum.
Let your lullaby be muzak: preverbal
polysyllables.
I’ve got to think about Rilke, Rex Morgan, the proper depth
to plant peas. Can’t afford
to wind up in the red.
Underneath I feel you
writing on my verso
busy as Karl Marx in the British Museum Reading Room
dreaming of the day
the sun lies in the grass like lust
the cicadas stop
suddenly
I wake up
as a spray can full of Easter 1916, turn
to the white wall of the afternoon
and publish your long wild in-
decipherable river
astonishing my strawberries
bequeathing sticky feet to flies.
BUT NATURE HAS HER DARKER SIDE
Owl owl owl. He finally, late that summer, spots a Great Horned Owl at dusk in a dead elm by the fence line. Big, blunt, clumsy as a tombstone, she suddenly
Swoops across the field –
lyric of ending.
No one stands a chance.
But in daytime can be made ridiculous as exiled potentates or nightmares. When crows discover a dozing owl they will often gather to caw in huge numbers, driving it to some other territory and diminishing its efficiency that night. Occasionally they fail to distinguish between nocturnal owls and those who eat lunch. They flock and caw around an unfamiliar Snowy Owl, recently arrived from tundra, who wakes, discovers herself in a fancy southern restaurant, spreads wings like a linen tablecloth –
To film this nest of Great Horned Owls we had to erect a scaffold for our blind close to their tree. (Shots of scaffolding and floodlights being carried through the bush.) Then we set up spotlights on three sides. By this time the owls have too much invested in the youngsters to object to an audience (shots of scrawny owlets like brainy bespectacled three-year-olds) or demand a contract. Looks like supper tonight is Meadowlark which Mom has brought home from her shopping expedition. (Dipping beaks into the yellow breast as though into a yolk. Indrawn ahs.) Well, nature has her darker side.
Actually, the owls are great conservationists because they eat their prey entire (a whole wing disappearing down an owlet) including the feathers, fur, bones, and beaks. Later they disgorge the indigestible bits in neat pellets.
One night darkness finds its voice outside his window: hoo hoo hoohoo. At first he lies and listens, letting an iceberg float through his mind. Then goes to the window and scans the spruce and maples, but its shape will not detach from shadow. Pulls on jeans and boots, runs out on the lawn, but the owl has heard the screen door and shut up. Somewhere up there two huge eyes devour his image. As we know, owls eat their prey entire, including jeans, boots, wallet, watch, and delicate intelligence. Later they disgorge the indigestible bits in neat pellets, which are saved and used to build the parthenon of nature’s darker side.
Focused on his own front lawn. Every year thousands of Canadians are reported missing. What happens to these people? What are the police, social agencies, poets, and clergymen doing about it? How can you tell if someone you know is about to become missing?
Later deeper into dark he is once more pulled from the covers. This time moonlight fills the yard, soaking into the bricks beside the window. Why he unbuttons his pyjamas, why he steps out onto the porch roof, he can’t say. Moonlight, radiant and cold as x-ray, saturates his skin. Hoohoo surrounds him, pulls his name into its interrogative. He creeps, peering, to the roof edge. The eaves-trough is so cold his toes clutch. Well, nature has her darker side. He soars off into night, trailing a long black ribbon like a loosely scribbled signature, left to hang from branches and hydro lines, and corkscrew smartly up his neighbour’s silo.
Because the feathers of an owl are soft and fluffy he is able to fly silently, caress the air. His victims have no warning but the sense that something’s missing, into which they fall. If the shadow of an owl should cross a poet’s roof, she wakes up, wild, with moths in her pyjamas, he rises from his bed, his pecker pointing to the north star.
II
THE WIND CHILL FACTOR
Cold’s wry overdrive
surprising bone by speaking
Bone ossified
Latin of last things.
Kric Krac Kroc
whisper the oracular
French Rice Krispies, emptiness
disguised as food.
Ice cubes
clink in your glass.
Clouds crystallize and break,
regather on the ground and lock.
You can’t
hide in the flesh
forever. Glaciers write with rock
on rock.
SNOW THICKENING ON THE TRANS-CANADA HIGHWAY
Dancing white
redundancies, a flock of ifs:
we switch to low beam to avoid hypnosis.
If we could see them under a microscope
Mrs. McLatchie said, each
would be a universe unlike
unique
and clear as she herself
declaring Canada’s Food Rules
or taping paper snowflakes to the window:
bits of lace, like her cuffs and handkerchiefs
fixed between us and the scruffy schoolyard.
Now, as the borders of the highway disappear
we think of Einstein.
Gaga futures turn our eyes into kaleidoscopes, our car
into the ditch where we grow
closer to our native tropicality, watch
shredded lire
blending to a blanket of lost hopes.
Value everywhere,
empty.
A wealth of natural resources.
Fifteen two fifteen four fifteen six in a
paper on re-
integrating us Trans-Canada strandees
an eminent psychologist observes our slow
return to speech.
Unlike the Inuit
we know fewer and fewer words for you-know-what
Until s–n–o–w itself eludes us.
Unable to see print we
focus in the depths of page and a
triple run is fifteen stranded
like the poet who is
stranded in another of the four
dozen (give or take a few) snow poems
he will have written by the time the drifts have reached his mouth
a
nd filled it with his epitaph:
some line that idles into lace
holds nothing in its holes like quick
cold eyes
melts
MIDWINTERING
1.
Such a long way from the heart to the extremities
we die back daily like the plants, each
to his office
autistic as our faithful
convalescent cars.
We eat the wings of large
flightless birds.
We wash our socks in the sink.
Each thing in itself.
2.
This is the secret life of light: a tiny
room with no dimensions but the
long ache of baroque:
evening is bleeding inward from the bowl’s edge, blue-
black with the heavy hint of snow:
a tear’s
interior. No one is home
at last.
3.
Listen: inside the deeper
shadow of the cedars, chickadee
has shifted from his trademark into
wistful – two notes in falling
minor third performs the soft drop from her collarbones
toward the south:
underneath its ice
ostinato, river has been running
running
river has been running our forgotten dreams in one long
uncut movie.
DRINKING LAKE SUPERIOR
Come on foot
and from far off,
carrying your pack of what
is necessary, falling
with the shield in drastic waves of rock, ridge by
ridge down the valley of a stream or fault until
your thirst is its desire, sung
cut from morning by White-throated sparrows.
As you walk, rehearse
your dealings with the elements:
have you made a poem out of wind, or drawn
gods on the rock in rock’s red ochre?
Can you fly?
Have you been buried (however briefly)
or on fire?
By the time you reach this beach you should be
something of a fool,
idling the shoreline where the rock is ground and
polished into jewels by this
overdose of clarity.
Drink.
Blood bone flesh weather water make
a man.
VIA, EASTBOUND
To this widescreen three-day tracking shot – equal thirds
of mountain, prairie, boreal forest –
each of us will add a plot:
it is always The Past, but eased,
oiled so it glides and
whispers from its depth, often
with the voice of a lost dog.
Travelling east, we age more quickly,
running into time, which travels
west. This train wants to be evening, wants that
blue-grey wash of snow and sky
eliding the horizon,
fading fast.
Toiling through the mountains like the seven
thousand dwarves,
earning every upward inch,
it dreams that the hell of its gut will find release
as lightning.
Everything will lie down in its speed,
a sort of sleep.
Meanwhile each Rocky poses in a sculpted
slow tableau, easily
seducing us to grandeur and glib
notions of eternity.
By nightfall it is chuckling over prairie
running on nothing but the cold air
of Saskatchewan, its dome car
empty as the mind of Buddha.
Window turns to mirror,
a black lake faintly smoked by blowing snow.
In it we can see our ghosts, transparent
creatures of the dark, bravely reading their
reversed editions of the Calgary Herald,
riding the freezing wind like gulls.
SUMMER AT LEITH
In those days
every moment was a hunch
and pause was full.
An afternoon became itself
simply.
Freshie with the aunts, paced
to the shush ah of the beach’s breathing
(possibly the boys
would like to learn canasta?), scented
by the overhanging cedars, in whose shadows,
wings ablur,
their iridescent needles pointing nowhere
dragonflies were dozing.
Sometimes, if a bat
flew down the chimney, evenings would erupt
in harmless panic, laughter, shrieks,
kids and uncles flailed with anything
that came to hand. One
was volleyed with a tennis racket and became
an old burnt-out cigar.
Whip-poor-wills, then
waking on the porch
embroidered by a warbler’s soft motifs, all,
the whole thing taken for granted.
The only rule was not to know the rules
made elsewhere.
Let memory blink you’re out like a bat
dodging traffic, ears tuned
to the heavy rumour of your future,
while the image of you, fuzzy
as fuzzy old Pooh (Aunt Helen
never really caught on to photography), still
trundles its toy milk cart
cottage to cottage.
SOFTBALL:
grows along the fringe of industry and corn.
You come upon it out of thick
summer darkness, floodlights
focusing a neighbourhood or township: way to
fire, way to mix, way to hum.
Everything trim,
unlike life: Frost Fence, straight
basepaths of lime, warm-up jackets worn by
wives and girl friends in the bleachers
match the uniforms performing on the field.
Half-tons stare blindly from the sidelines.
Overhead
unnoticed nighthawks flash past the floodlights effortlessly
catching flies: way to
dip, pick, snag that sucker,
way to be.
Down here everyone is casual and tense,
tethered to a base.
Each has a motive, none
an alibi.
The body is about to be discovered.
He peers in for the sign, perfect order
a diamond in the pitcher’s mind.
Chance will be fate, all
will be out. Someone
will be called to arabesque or glide
someone
muscular and shy
will become the momentary genius of the infield.
MIDNIGHT DIP
Whose dumb idea was this
anyhow? Silently
the chill air purges content and establishes
its interrogative. This is going to be
more dangerous than we supposed, wrapped
in our living room of beer and friendly conversation.
Moonlight
sheds itself along the path, madly
abandoned underwear.
What essences await us in the lake,
that lived inside our talk as easily
as bath and wash, now
sharpening to something like the afterlife of music moving in an
arc beyond the reaches of its melody?
SOME FUNCTIONS OF A LEAF
To whisper. To applaud the wind
and hide the Hermit thrush.
To catch the light
and work the humble spell of photosynthesis
(excuse me, sir, if I might have one word)
by which it’s changed to wood.
To wait
willing to feed
and be
food.
To die with style:
as the tree retreats inside itself,
shutting off the valves at its
extremities
to starve in Technicolor, then
having served two hours in a children’s leaf pile, slowly
stir its vitamins into the earth.
To be the artist of mortality.
LOST SISTERS
so small
I can’t pick you up in my arms or on
the radar of imagination, in my dreams you are
the ghosts of ghosts.
Your names
fit loosely and you slide
between the letters, too fine
for this ordinary mesh.
Uncontaminated as a tribe known
only to itself, you can’t
be spoken to or looked at, perish
when you hit the page.
What’s it like, up there?
Do you ache for earth the way we ache for air,
do you dream
in loam and humus?
Are you bored with your nunnery,
its pale symmetries and soft
Pre-Raphaelite decor?
Do you read fairy tales of Burger King and Dairy Queen,
aristocrats of the banal?
No traces of you in the attic,
no snapshots, footprints, spoon-marks on the table
where you never beat the rhythm of those appetites
you never had – your absence like abandoned
Ariadne’s thread insinuating
everywhere, the ripcord,
the sad clause in the fine print,
the catch,
my lost sisters,
this tiny catch in my voice.