Camber

by Don McKay

  to lead us, somehow,

  out of language and intelligence.

  IV

  EARLY INSTRUMENTS

  The wolf at the door

  and the wolf in the forest and the work

  work work of art. The scrape,

  the chop, the saw tooth

  tasting maple. The cradle, the cup, the muscle

  in your mother’s arm and back

  and pelvis, muscle flexing in the air

  between two people arguing,

  two people loving, muscle

  pumping blood. Gut

  summoned to speak. The rotary cuff, the wrist,

  having learnt the trick of witching wands and locks,

  the heft, the grain, the web,

  the rub of moving parts.

  And the tiny sea in the ear

  and the moth wing in the mind, which wait.

  TWINFLOWER

  What do you call

  the muscle we long with? Spirit?

  I don’t think so. Spirit is a far cry. This

  is a casting outward which

  unwinds inside the chest. A hole

  which complements the heart.

  The ghost of a chance.

  *

  Then God said, O.K. let’s get this show

  on the road, boy, get some names

  stuck on these critters, and Adam,

  his head on the ground in a patch of tiny

  pink-white flowers, said

  mmn, just a sec.

  He was, let’s say,

  engrossed in their gesture,

  the two stalks rising, branching, falling back

  into nodding bells, the fading arc

  that would entrance Pre-Raphaelites and basketball.

  Maybe he browsed among the possibilities of elves.

  Maybe he was blowing on the blossoms,

  whispering whatever came into his head, I have

  no way of knowing what transpired

  as Adam paused, testing his parent’s

  limit, but I know

  it matters.

  *

  Through the cool woods of the lower

  slopes, where the tall

  Lodgepole Pine point

  into the wild blue while they supervise

  the shaded space below, I walk,

  accompanied by my binoculars and field guides.

  I am working on the same old problem,

  how to be both

  knife and spoon, when there they are, and maybe have been

  all along, covering the forest floor: a creeper, a shy

  hoister of flags, a tiny lamp to read by, one

  word at a time.

  Of course, having found them, I’m about

  to find them in the field guide, and the bright

  reticulated snaps of system will occur

  as the plant is placed, so, among the honeysuckles,

  in cool dry northern woods from June to August.

  But this is not, despite the note of certainty,

  the end. Hold the book open,

  leaf to leaf. Listen now,

  Linnaea borealis, while I read of how

  you have been loved –

  with keys and adjectives and numbers, all the teeth

  the mind can muster. How your namer,

  Carolus Linnaeus, gave you his

  to live by in the system he devised.

  How later, it was you,

  of all the plants he knew and named,

  he asked to join him in his portrait.

  To rise in your tininess,

  to branch and nod beside him

  as he placed himself in that important

  airless room.

  TO SPEAK OF PATHS

  … c’est le moment de parler de vous, chemins qui vous effacez de cette terre victime.

  – Yves Bonnefoy

  One gestures to a blue

  fold in the hills, meaning

  follow your heart. Another scrawls

  follow your nose into the raspberry canes

  and may later show itself to be

  the deer’s own way to the water.

  Some will speak

  only to the third and fourth ears that persist,

  vestigially, in the feet.

  One way or another

  they feed us a line, and we go,

  dithering over the outwash or angled as an oar

  into the forest, headed for the top,

  the lake, the photo

  opportunity, the grave of the trapper

  who lived all alone and trained a moose

  to pull his sleigh.

  Strange marks on a far slope turn out,

  hours later, to have been your zigzag path ascending,

  earning every inch the waterfall beside it spends

  like a hemorrhage. And always

  the thrill of the pause, when your eye drinks

  and your heart pounds and your legs

  imagine roots, when your whole life,

  like a posse, may catch up with you and tumble

  headlong into the moment.

  You may wish to say something to it, but your tongue

  seems to be turning to an alder twig

  and you must wait for wind.

  GLENN GOULD, HUMMING

  not along with the music, which isn’t listening,

  but to the animal inside the instrument,

  muffling the perfections of hammer, pedal,

  wire, the whole

  tool-kit, humming

  he furs the air,

  paints an exquisite velvet painting of a far-off country

  where the rain falls

  contrapuntally the wind lies on the land

  like a hand caressing a cat’s back, humming

  “this is your death, which is but a membrane away,

  which is but a leaf, turning,

  which is falling in these delicate

  explicit fingers, as you have always known,

  and worn, though only we,

  the instrumentalists,

  have found a way to sing it for you.

  Sleep.”

  SONG FOR BEEF CATTLE

  To be whimless, o monks of melancholy,

  to be continents completely

  colonized, to stand

  humped and immune, digesting,

  redigesting our domestication, to be too too

  solid flesh making its slow

  progress toward fast food.

  To feel our heavy heads becoming knock-knock jokes,

  who’s there,

  kabonk, Big Mac, to know our knees

  are filled-in ampersands, things to fall on,

  not run with.

  To put all this to music – a bellow

  which extinguishes the wolf, the long arc of its howl

  reduced to gravity and spread,

  ghostless, flatulent,

  over the overgrazed acres.

  CAMOUFLAGE

  The Ruffed Grouse cannot be seen unless you step inside its panic, and, since this must be done by accident, there is a certain stress involved. Brambambambambam. As though your poor heart hadn’t enough to put up with, now it’s exploded, like popcorn battering the lid with fluffy white fists. Simply ignore it. This was but a ruse to distract you from the grouse itself, as it flaps, an obese moth, further off into the underbrush. Notice instead the subtle blendings of bar and shade, everything ish, everything soft, the apotheosis of feather. But as your heart can appreciate, its terror is a sumo wrestler.

  It is easier to make one in your own yard. Just scrape together a clump of dead leaves about the size of a football. Add an elderberry for an eye, and squeeze together – not too hard, you don’t want to wind up with a pigeon – as if you were making dough. Leave a small cavity for your secret fear. Cover and let stand. After an hour place it under a bush, turn your back, and – presto! – it’s a clump of dead leaves again. But a clump of dead leaves capable of instant catastro
phe. All your eggs in one basket.

  BIG ALBERTA CLOUDS

  If unknowing is a cloud, it must be elsewhere –

  some baffled kingdom

  where they clot in thickening air.

  Here, in radical 3-D,

  dangerous brains are hung against the sky, unembodied,

  cumulative, Nietzschean,

  making themselves up.

  They cast their shadows on the crops,

  they make the spruce sing sharp,

  and scare the people into being weather-wise,

  watchful. Clarity

  attends them and great weight

  withheld. Oscar Peterson plays “In the Wee Small Hours”

  with such softness in such power

  and vice versa. Look:

  here comes the camel, the whale, the Kleenex, l’oreiller

  d’assassin. Watch.

  They signify all over the map

  and do not fear to tread.

  ALIBI

  Because the swallows had departed from the cliff,

  over and over,

  the soft knives of their wings tasting the river mist as they

  went wherever it is

  they went, because

  with the air free of their chatter we could hear ourselves

  think, because the notes

  we left in their holes, full of love and envy

  and lament, were never answered and because we need

  an earth with ears to hear the long dread

  carpentry of history, and then, and so, and so,

  and then, each bone nailed, wired, welded,

  riveted, because we knew

  the gods we loved were charismatic fictions, and because

  the swallows had departed.

  KINDS OF BLUE #76 (EVENING SNOW)

  A blue against the easy clarities of sky,

  a blue that eats the light, a bruise

  ascended from forgetfulness. Things

  have been overtaken by their shadows, stilled

  and stricken dumb. What did they know

  anyway? Only cold may speak

  or not speak. Inside pain,

  singing, inside song

  another pain which is the dialects of snow.

  And us, full of holes

  and chambers

  and for rent.

  HOSPITAL ZONE

  First we feel it, trouble, trouble, our airspace

  beaten by its own scared heart,

  then spot the little bug-blot growing in the sky,

  descending to the heliport.

  We’ve all seen M*A*S*H,

  those domesticated valkyries. Yet

  it holds our ears and gazes, throbbing

  like the heavy bass on someone else’s amp as it

  hovers, lowers as though trying to lay an egg,

  carefully. See,

  says a lady at the day care,

  crouching by a child, someone sick

  is coming to the hospital from way up north.

  I’m paused beside them on the sidewalk,

  thinking of Virginia Woolf – how she would

  cherish this bouquet of looks, this small

  figure in the infinite welter of mind –

  until it drops from sight. Well.

  It’s the machines who will keep watch now, high

  in those immaculate rooms, chirping and pinging

  like kept birds, counting the atoms

  as they fall.

  And the angel,

  when it comes, may not announce itself

  with any buffeting of ears,

  may not even whisper,

  may not even be a full-fledged angel, may be

  just an eddy of the air, which

  catches the stuttered heart in its two-step

  and is off.

  RAIN, RAIN, RAIN

  On the roof its drone

  is the horizon drawing closer for a

  kiss, for an embrace whose message is,

  whose muscle is the comfort of,

  the family of,

  the sociability of being mortal.

  Outside, the leaves have multiplied its pitter

  into the stuff of plainsong.

  So many oceans to be spoken of.

  Such soft ovations numbering

  innumerable names for hush.

  Who understands this tongue? No one.

  No one and no one and no one.

  SONG FOR THE SONG OF THE VARIED THRUSH

  In thin

  mountain air, the single note

  lives longer, laid along its

  uninflected but electric, slightly

  ticklish line, a close

  vibrato waking up the pause

  which follows, then

  once more on a lower or a higher pitch and

  in this newly minted

  interval you realize the wilderness

  between one breath

  and another.

  SONG FOR THE SONG OF THE WOOD THRUSH

  For the following few seconds, while the ear

  inhales the evening

  only the offhand is acceptable. Poetry

  clatters. The old contraption pumping

  iambs in my chest is going to take a break

  and sing a little something. What? Not much. There’s

  a sorrow that’s so old and silver it’s no longer

  sorry. There’s a place

  between desire and memory, some back porch

  we can neither wish for nor recall.

  THE LAUGH

  The inverse of language is like a laughter that seeks to destroy language, a laughter infinitely reverberated.

  – Emmanuel Levinas

  The laugh that ate the snake and

  runs through the city dressed in a sneeze, the mischief

  done in these sly

  passages of time, when the tongue is

  severed from the voice and

  fed to the weather, when the running

  patter of catbirds simply

  swallows the agenda, nothing to be held back,

  nothing rescued in a catch-phrase or figure, your

  house is on fire

  and your children are gone.

  When evenings pass as unseen

  immaculate ships, and folk –

  everyone is suddenly folk – rush to their porches

  and lift their faces to this

  effervescence of air,

  wishing.

  Wishing what?

  Just wishing.

  SUDDENLY, AT HOME

  there was no place we could sit or look

  that was not changed to an icon, cursed

  with significance: the clothes tree

  groping air, the last video, her fish still

  nosing the glass, the clocks,

  which might as well be moons, the beds,

  mouths, and the great great

  grandmother staring bleakly from her portrait.

  It is just what she might have suspected.

  Suddenly at home the cigarette replaces sentences,

  its red eye burning in.

  In each phrase

  the blesse’d finch of small talk perishes.

  What can you say,

  we say, it will take

  time, we say, while the mills of thought churn

  should have should have and the dog

  holds everyone under suspicion.

  APRÈS LA BOHÉME

  After the aesthetic poverty, the bonhomie,

  bravado, after the melodies which swell and

  spread themselves like easy money,

  no one pays the bill

  and Mimi dies on four blasts from the horns.

  Death is outside in his pickup

  which is like a rock. C’mon Mimi

  for chrissake.

  Now what, brave

  bohemians, with the century down to its last

  evocative cough and bad

  inflamm
able manuscript,

  and an ocean of cold hands rising in the streets?

  WHAT KIND OF FOOL AM I?

  Bill Evans Solo Sessions 1963

  To find your way through the

  phrase. Some keys are made of edges some

  of broken glass. Bauble. Bangle. You knew the tune

  before it was mined. You are the kind of fool

  who searches through the rubble of his favourite

  things. A note could fall in love off

  a cliff down a well. When you fall it

  will be forever. Whoever has no house whoever

  picks his way and finds

  his favourite ledge. Far from April,

  far from Paris. Far from his left hand down there

  pecking the bright shiny beads. Telling them

  off. That kind of fool. Everything

  happened to you.

  MATÉRIEL

  I. THE MAN FROM NOD

  Since his later history is so obscure, it’s no wonder he is most remembered for his first bold steps in the areas of sibling rivalry and land use. It should not be forgotten that, although Adam received God’s breath, and angels delivered his message, it was Cain who got tattooed – inscribed with the sign which guarantees a sevenfold revenge to be dished out to antagonists. Sometimes translated “Born to Lose.”

  He was the first to realize there is no future in farming.

  How must he have felt, after tilling, sowing, weeding, harvesting, and finally offering his crop, about God’s preference for meat? Was God trying to push his prized human creatures further into the fanged romance of chasing and escaping? Was he already in the pocket of the cattle barons? Cain must have scratched and scratched his head before he bashed in his brother’s.