Camber

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.