Camber

by Don McKay

  THE NIGHT SHIFT

  This is a secret.

  The barn across the road grows dark and inward

  sending thin gleams through its chinks like hints.

  The dog sniffs, barks at nothing

  dissolves into a tawny pool on the porch.

  Absent-mindedness

  finds its medium.

  The last tractor dies

  chortling. There are

  birds no one has ever seen

  uncaged in any book unguessed

  by metaphor

  chirping from the uncombed fringes of the lawn.

  Flowers begin inhaling through their roots

  exhaling darkness.

  Fields are seduced outward to their edges where raccoons

  whet their wits against us.

  DIXIELAND CONTRAPTION BLUES

  Cranks up one end

  sputters out the other:

  in between, the whine

  the whinny and the fart

  achieve their several perfections.

  When I got up this morning

  I had an aching head, etc., and the domestic

  animals were running the machines,

  loosely with their wry

  imaginations and beaucoup de second-hand smoke.

  I used to think the head was zoned

  exclusively for single family dwellings, simple

  as the wish for a dog of one’s own.

  As though

  our lives were not long lusts for

  instrumentation when I

  got up this morning I had gas in my

  trombone I had a

  frenzy in my clarinet:

  as though I never

  wished to slide an early

  morning stroll into your ear easily

  as easy-over eggs as though

  this bed were never empty we were

  never swung by pendula of raw

  emotion like cheap golf clubs or

  disaster in the drums as though

  o baby

  it wasn’t wailing in the rec rooms of the spirit

  anyhow

  DEEP VEIN THROMBOSIS

  Okeanos, ocean river, perfect

  circle of psychoses (motion, matter), once

  you went without saying, the pure

  verb of the heart.

  Now

  you snag on my thought like a red kite

  in a leafless tree.

  Punctuated by dreadful caesurae

  you do the thrombus

  left foot

  left foot

  dance of the stoolies naming names, lapsing

  blush by blush into my consciousness

  where you will live another life,

  more public, filled with acid rain and politics, the bad

  pornography of medicine.

  TROUBLE IN PARADISE

  Act 13. Tinkerbell is dead, a crumpled

  Kleenex by the sofa. Lost

  boys and girls are playing indians and

  pirates in the rec room,

  brandishing their edges, really

  bleeding. Fluorescent lighting. Each

  totes a pack oozing the PCBs of his

  and her sad histories, a sort

  of Germany.

  Back in Act 12, voice

  put down its animals and has taken up

  the telephone, paring down to buzz whine

  click.

  I’m not home right now.

  So what? I got your number

  into which

  you will reduce, or else:

  the original recorded message, something muttering

  for chrissake

  let there be dark.

  EDGE OF NIGHT

  Certainly the dead watch us, but not

  as opera, nor as the Great Grey Owl

  tunes in gophers underground.

  We are their daytime television.

  Sometimes, mid-line, you can

  sense their presence like the

  o in rôle beneath its roof, a lope

  detached from body.

  Don’t let on. Tell Brenda

  that you’ve had a sex change or that

  Harold has run off with her Electrolux, keep

  talking lest you fall in with their radical bemusement

  and lose interest. This is serious. Invest.

  Hold on to the blues. You might win a bedroom suite.

  For everyone.

  TALK’S END

  “Mind bent around the inner ear,”

  a foreign agent

  round her short wave. Snap,

  Crackle, Pop. No one

  speaks her language, its soft paws

  harden into anglo-Saxon hammer

  anvil stirrup no gaps in this traffic.

  *

  If I were five hundred years ago,

  Japanese, and gathered

  I would not be talking with my teeth.

  My tongue would feather a curve into the air: so:

  I would leave you with the soft

  end of the quill.

  *

  Uninhabited thin

  winter light stares in each window

  redefining edge.

  From room to room inside these clothes inside

  this skin: rented:

  now I owe everything to the owls.

  III

  SONG FOR WILD PHLOX

  Suddenly, June 1, for no good reason,

  the riverbank opens its heart: purple,

  purplish, blue, whitish, common

  currency from a country warmer than ours,

  but cooler in its evenings and foothills.

  My Great

  Aunt Helen, though proper, used to be addicted

  to lacrosse, and sat behind the penalty box

  to scold opposing players sent off. Nothing

  we ever did deserves

  these weeds, which seed themselves

  in places we have honoured with neglect.

  One evening the dog comes home

  freckled with petals of phlox, and for a moment

  I imagine the wild wedding in the meadow

  where his ample humour must have fit right in

  with its numerous kisses and pranks.

  MEDITATION ON BLUE

  Irresistible, on this atmospheric planet, where

  there’s a blue to carry the heart home and a blue

  for virgins and a blue to call

  the spider from the drain.

  Nobody argues with its

  shameless imitation of love, diving

  simultaneously into the eye and out of sight: sea,

  sky, the absence of convulsions and flags,

  our own errata winking at us out of depths or heights.

  Knowing that one day we will fall to black

  or fade to grey, and blue

  has been both places and includes them

  as a saxophone includes its drastic

  possibilities. It’s with us.

  We’ve been gone before.

  THE WOLF

  Wolf: a jarring sound occasionally heard from certain notes in bowed instruments. The body of the instrument, as a whole, resonates to a certain note and jars, just as a room-ornament is sometimes found to jar every time a certain note of the piano is played.

  – The Oxford Companion to Music

  Poplar Grove is when the cello shakes the breastbone

  and The Cage

  is when the heart does.

  Antelope is elongation of the field, when brain

  has the illusion of unfolding into prairie.

  Sometimes an acoustic host expects the melody so

  eagerly a placeless humming “huhuhu” develops

  and flies round among the putti:

  this is The Snipe.

  But The Wolf:

  The Wolf is when the wood itself,

  carved, bent, and

  stretched, is moved –

  perhaps some memory of rain –


  and woofs its execrable music.

  Then some of us will be embarrassed

  and pretend it never happened, and the rest

  will think of driving home after the sky has

  snowed its first wet snow, then drizzled,

  then turned so dark and glossy that the highway dreams the

  deep black lava dream and flows toward it,

  asphalt to asphalt.

  CHOOSING THE BOW

  The dark bow, you explain, wants her head and

  flicks into saltando, taking arpeggia

  the way a teenager takes stairs. The heavier,

  reddish bow will bite and makes a cross-hatched,

  comfortable largo. In the kitchen

  the violin-maker’s daughter is pretending

  she has lost her hands.

  Where did they go?

  Are they hiding under the snow, clasped,

  plotting in their sleep like rhizomes?

  Before the discovery of America,

  her father says, bows were made of ironwood.

  Now we use pernambuco, from Brazil,

  a wood so dense it

  tenses at the slightest flex

  and sinks in water. Outside the window, snow

  swoons abundantly into its soft self, as though

  a great composer had stopped

  dead in his tracks, spilling an infinity of crotchets

  quavers phrases into the earth’s lap.

  You guess where did my hands go, O.K.?

  Have they moved in

  with the rabbits, to stroke their terrors

  and teach them to count?

  Or are they stealing secrets

  from the spruce, the horse, the pernambuco,

  maple, whale, ebony, elephant, and cat

  in order to compose themselves a voice?

  Riversinew forming in the other room.

  Someone knocking at the door.

  RECIPE FOR DIVERTIMENTO IN D, K: 136

  1. Allegro

  Gather tictocks, stir in a pot and feed to

  tigers. Run these cats round a tree until they

  turn to butter. Spread on a muffin. Makes an

  excellent breakfast.

  2. Andante

  Let the clock remember the summer sadly.

  Simmer. Tie this phrase to the seagull soaring

  past. When seagull reaches the far horizon

  lower the curtain.

  3. Presto

  Catch two chipmunks. Marinate. Open sleeping

  clock and toss in merrily. Add the gusto.

  Keep the sneezing regular, duple, hearty.

  Tickles the angels.

  BONE POEMS

  I.

  Mind is crossed, above

  by clouds, below

  by their fallen brothers, the bears: brown, black

  cinnamon and grizzly.

  Busy as tugs

  they tow their moods across the screen.

  But body is the home of a birch wood

  whose limbs are unwritten-upon paper, listening

  motionless

  full of dance

  II.

  Of all your secret selves, it is the most remote, communicating in the intimate, carrying timbre of glaciers and French horns. Its unheard hum arrives at inner ear without passing the receptionist. Mostly we are tuned to the heart (passion, drugs, intrigues, attacks), but it is through the bone self that the deaf hear symphonies, that mothers know beforehand that their children are in trouble, and that we maintain our slender diplomatic ties with the future and the dead. Bones attend to deep earth, while your heart is learning, year by year, to listen to your watch.

  III.

  Outcrops. A lost

  civilization hinted at by cheekbones.

  Little is known, except

  they knew how to be lost. Apparently

  where we have closets

  they had porches.

  Everything blew off.

  Experience was complete combustion, hence

  the scarcity of ash or

  personality:

  their minds unstained glass

  windows, delicately veined

  as wings of dragonflies

  IV. ANTLER

  Holy Cow. Some creature

  so completely music that its bones

  burst into song.

  Now we understand those stories of the savage

  pianist, annually growing hands

  that stretch three octaves reaching for the loon’s cry fingers

  sprouting from their fingers, brilliant

  failures thrown out each December.

  Truly, we will also lose ourselves in forest,

  wearing our lawn rakes fanned above our heads, tines

  turned toward its darkness,

  listening for the lost arpeggio.

  V. VERTEBRAL LAMENT

  More orders from the star chamber: Higher! Straighter!

  To us, the once proud horizontal race of snakes.

  Fuck their empire. Remember the amputation.

  Recite the remnants of our alphabet, Atlas to Lumbar,

  meditating on the lost ones. Query, Sylphid, Zeno,

  how they listened and lashed the air and

  taught us poetry and danced, far

  lither than the arms of maestro as

  attired in his pathetic morning coat

  he writhes upon the podium.

  VI.

  Now we know the price of x-ray:

  if you want to see your bones you have to

  flirt with death a little. Moon-bathe.

  Anticipate their liberation from your flesh.

  Once upon a time

  shoe stores had peep shows that could

  melt your skin and show the bones

  inside your feet (plenty of room for him to grow there,

  ma’am). You looked down zillions, back

  into an ocean where a loose

  family of fish was

  wriggling in blue spooky light.

  There are other worlds.

  Your dead dog swims in the earth.

  VIII.

  One day you will have to give yourselves

  to clutter and the ravages

  of air and be

  no good for nothing and forget

  how de ankle bone connected to de shin bone and de

  word of de lawd. Truthless

  you will lie in the kingdom of parts among

  Loosestrife, Nightshade,

  Pokeweed.

  You will learn the virtues of your former enemies,

  the sticks and stones, and bless

  the manyness of rain.

  In some other lifetime you may work

  as a knife, a flute, a pair of dice, a paperweight

  or charm.

  Meanwhile forgive the rasp rasp

  of the teething wire-haired

  terrier.

  NOCTURNE MACDONALD-CARTIER FREEWAY

  In the archipelago of coffee, each man is an island. The women are – who knows where – withdrawn but not quite vanished, like god at the end of the nineteenth century. Between your figure and the ground there is a tissue of airless space about the thickness of a piece of paper, in which all double helices untwine, adieu my little corkscrew, and swim offstage at the speed of light. Warnings, some visible, are posted at each junction. The floor may be slippery, the eyes in the mirror may be holes, the cashier may be unfamiliar with your gravity, the money may be avian. But the coffee is real and powers the economy.

  Along the re-entry ramp the transports twinkle. Probably their drivers are asleep, ghosts in the machines. We say goodbye to Christmas in Cubism and follow our headlights into the dark.

  We drive because we believe in the death of traffic. There will be a kitchen in the middle of a forest, its windows widening slowly, reaching their frames but continuing until the walls are erased. You turn on the tap, an underground river leaps sixty feet into your mouth, a perfectly
composed dream. No phone-ins. No hits from the sixties. No eye in the sky. No internal combustion of any kind. No memory lane. The first song sparrow will have your whole head to itself.

  WAKING AT THE MOUTH OF THE WILLOW RIVER

  Sleep, my favourite flannel shirt, wears thin, and shreds, and bird-song happens in the holes. In thirty seconds the naming of species will begin. As it folds into the stewed Latin of afterdream each song makes a tiny whirlpool. One of them, zoozeezoozoozee, seems to be making fun of sleep with snores stolen from comic books. Another hangs its teardrop high in the mind, and melts: it was, after all, only narrowed air, although it punctuated something unheard, perfectly. And what sort of noise would the mind make, if it could, here at the brink? Scritch, scritch. A claw, a nib, a beak, worrying its surface. As though, for one second, it could let the world leak back to the world. Weep.

  MEDITATION IN AN UNCUT CORNFIELD, NOVEMBER

  The sky looks elsewhere, embarrassed.

  I have evidently wandered into an old regimental photograph and stand, fading, having no slang, in its legendary mud. We slouch at attention. It is still too wet for the machines, and it will always be. Our sweethearts have married the boys from two doors down and we forget why we were so sad and horny. After the ball is over in Hell Collegiate and Vocational School, no one tidies up, though everyone, mildly encumbered with crepe, wishes someone would. Wasn’t there some magic word that could translate sunlight into sugar? Our tongues stiffen. We all worry at once, cackling like old plastic raincoats over the death of the angel, the death of the author, the breakdown of the tractor. (There was a time, now.) How long until we’re rumours of the death of death? Until we always, only, occur in public?