by Don McKay
SETTING THE TABLE
1. Knife
who comes to the table fresh
from killing the pig, edge
of edges,
entry into zip.
Knife
who can swim as its secret
through the dialogue or glimmer
in a kitchen drawer. Who first appeared
in God’s hand to divide
the day from the night, then the sheep
from the goats, then from the other
sheep, then from their comfortable
fleeces. Nothing sinister in this except
it had to happen and it was the first
to have to. The imperative
mood. For what we about to take
we must be grateful.
2. Fork
a touch of kestrel,
of Chopin, your hand with its fork
hovers above the plate, or punctuates
a proposition. This is the devil’s favourite
instrument, the fourfold
family of prongs: Hard Place,
Rock, Something You Should Know,
and For Your Own Good. At rest,
face up, it says,
please, its tines
pathetic as an old man’s fingers on a bed.
Face down it says
anything that moves.
3. Spoon
whose eloquence
is tongueless, witless, fingerless,
an absent egg.
Hi Ho, sing knife and fork, as off they go,
chummy as good cop and bad cop,
to interrogate the supper. Spoon waits
and reflects your expression,
inverted, in its tarnished moonlight. It knows
what it knows. It knows hunger
from the inside
out.
ABANDONED TRACKS: AN ECLOGUE
As always, I walk the ties, trying to
syncopate my step to their awkward
interval. It’s hot. At some age, six or eight,
the distance matches the length of your leg exactly,
you can march to town in two-four time. Now
Cow Vetch and Mustard get in the way
and hide the ties. “Sleepers.” Watch your step.
A Goldfinch lands on a rail, then a White-tail Dragonfly,
its pause a half-beat between darts. The heat
is tired in its bones, exhausted by absent thunder
like a couple trying to get pregnant, dragging their sad
much-discussed ass to bed.
Back in Moderns, Dr. Reaney led us
into Yoknapatawpha County. He had been there. “Remember
it is hot; stick all that past in a pot
and set it on the stove.” Bindweed and Wild Grape
curl around the rails, tendrils, tentacles, the tracks
in the distance with their old
Parkinsonian shake. Around my head
the comic-book sign for dizziness is being etched
by deerflies. Quentin Compson
hungers for his sister, who will later bear a daughter,
also Quentin, who will steal the cash,
her own, from her ordinary, evil
uncle, and run off with the red-tied carny-man. Hawkweed
and Daisies
sharpen their hardihood on gravel. The spikes,
once hammered like cold bolts from the blue,
are loosening. Feel this –
a wobbly tooth. We loved the old train, really, it
would take an afternoon’s mosquito and cicada hum,
pre-amplify it, put a big bass underneath, we’d feel it
in the air the way, I guess, a horse can sense an earthquake
coming, we’d
drop everything – berry pails, books – and run down
to the tracks, Luke in manic overdrive because
June was busting out all over and we’d all turned dog. We’d stand
throbbing in its aura, waving; the blunt-faced locomotive,
a few tanker cars full of polysyllabic stuff,
the caboose with maybe a reciprocating wave, the throb
thinning to the whine of iron wheels on iron rails.
To be next door to violence, that dreadful
blundering. It was fun. It was cathartic. Now it’s like
single-point perspective had let go, shattering into the tip
tilt hop of the Yellow warbler’s pointillist attention
in the Rock elm. So much intricate
tenacity. Milkweed with its lavish
muted blooms, the milk that feeds the larvae
of Monarch butterflies and makes them
poisonous to birds. When the train ran over Luke
it was too dumb to pause or blow its whistle, probably
never saw him there between the tracks or heard us
shouting into the electric deafness of the moment.
Well. That spot is occupied by Bladder campion now.
With its cheeks puffed out behind its blooms, it’s like
a gang of Dizzy Gillespies and the final
freeze-frame for the story: except, somehow
Luke survived the train, and then the shock,
which also should have killed him.
Back from the vet, stitched,
still groggy from the drugs, he sensed the old throb
troubling the air and struggled growling to his feet
ready for round two. Talk about dumb. It was funny
and appalling, and we knew, wincing at each other,
that it wasn’t just our true intrepid friend
we were appalled by. When the Monarchs hatch
they’ll feed and flit and pollinate their hosts,
by accident, and after an infinitude of flits
wind up precisely in one Mexican valley. Some thoughts
live in the mind as larvae, some as the milk they feed on,
some as the wanderings which are the way. Heal-all,
Yarrow. Everything the tracks
have had no use for’s happening
between them.
TO DANCELAND
No one is ever happier than when they’re dancing.
– Margaret McKay
South through bumper crops we are driving to Danceland, barley
oats, canola, wheat, thick as a beaver pelt, but late, she said,
late, since June had been so cold already we were deep
in August and still mostly green so it was nip
and tuck with frost and somewhere between Nipawin and
Tisdale finally
I found the way to say, um, I can’t dance
you know, I can’t dance don’t ask me
why I am driving like a fool to Danceland having flunked it
twenty-seven years ago in the kitchen where my mother,
bless her, tried to teach me while I passively resisted,
doing the jerk-step while she tried to slow, slow, quick quick
slow between the table and the fridge, her face fading
like someone trying to start a cranky Lawnboy
nevertheless,
step by sidestep
we are driving down the grid, Swainson’s hawks occurring every
thirty hydro poles, on average
to Danceland
where the dancefloor floats on rolled horsehair
and the farmers dance with their wives even though it is
not Chicago
where the mirror ball blesses everyone with flecks from
another, less rigorous, dimension
where the Westeel granary dances with the weathervane,
the parent with the child, the John Deere with the mortgage
where you may glimpse occasional coyote lopes and gopher hops
where the dark may become curious and curl one long arm
around us
as we pause for a moment, and I think about my mother
and her
wishes in that kitchen, then
we feed ourselves to the world’s most amiable animal,
in Danceland.
V
SOMETIMES A VOICE (1)
Sometimes a voice – have you heard this? –
wants not to be voice any longer, wants something
whispering between the words, some
rumour of its former life. Sometimes, even
in the midst of making sense or conversation it will
hearken back to breath, or even farther,
to the wind, and recognize itself
as troubled air, a flight path still
looking for its bird.
I’m thinking of us up there
shingling the boathouse roof. That job is all
off balance – squat, hammer, body skewed
against the incline, heft the bundle,
daub the tar, squat. Talking,
as we always talked, about not living
past the age of thirty with its
labyrinthine perils: getting hooked,
steady job, kids, business suit. Fuck that. The roof
sloped upward like a take-off ramp
waiting for Evel Knievel, pointing into open sky. Beyond it
twenty feet or so of concrete wharf before
the blue-black water of the lake. Danny said
that he could make it, easy. We said
never. He said case of beer, put up
or shut up. We said
asshole. Frank said first he should go get our beer
because he wasn’t going to get it paralysed or dead.
Everybody got up, taking this excuse
to stretch and smoke and pace the roof
from eaves to peak, discussing gravity
and Steve McQueen, who never used a stunt man, Danny’s
life expectancy, and whether that should be a case
of Export or O’Keefe’s. We knew what this was –
ongoing argument to fray
the tedium of work akin to filter vs. plain,
stick shift vs. automatic, condom vs.
pulling out in time. We flicked our butts toward the lake
and got back to the job. And then, amid the squat,
hammer, heft, no one saw him go. Suddenly he
wasn’t there, just his boots
with his hammer stuck inside one like a heavy-headed
flower. Back then it was bizarre that,
after all that banter, he should be so silent,
so inward with it just to
run off into sky. Later I thought,
cool. Still later I think it makes sense his voice should
sink back into breath and breath
devote itself to taking in whatever air
might have to say on that short flight between the roof
and the rest of his natural life.
LIFT
To stand with mind akimbo where the wind
riffles the ridge. Slow,
slow jazz: it must begin
before the instrument with bones
dreaming themselves hollow and the dusk
rising in them like a sloth
ascending. Moon,
night after night rehearsing shades of pause
and spill, sifting into reed beds,
silvering the fine hairs on your arms, making
rhythm out of light and nothing, making
months. What have I ever made of life or it
of me, all I ever asked for was to be remembered
constantly by everything I ever touched. So much
to relinquish there’s a housing crisis
in eternity. What I need now is two square
yards of night to wrap up in,
a chrysalis from which, who knows
how many epochs later,
something – maybe dotted, maybe ragged,
maybe dun – unfolds. Something quick.
Something helpful to the air.
DRAG
But, however,
on the other hand.
Not gravity, that irresistible embrace,
but its photograph, packed in your bag
with too many shirts. Drag
wants to dress the nakedness of speed, to hold clothes
in the slipstream until body reincarnates, then
it will be sorry, won’t it?
Yes it will. It will be as sorry as the
square of its upward urge.
When I approached the edge
it seemed one gentle waft
would carry me across, the brief lilt
of a Horned Lark up from roadside gravel
into the adjacent field.
However,
on the other hand. It occurred to me that,
unlike Horned Larks, who are imagination,
I was mostly memory, which,
though photogenic and nutritious, rich
with old-time goodness, is notoriously
heavier than air.
DARK OF THE MOON
Once past the street lights I miss it,
“poised” at the spruce tip, “floating”
in the pond, the way it gathered longing into moths
and kept reality from overdosing on its own sane
self. It seems the dead,
who would otherwise be dressing up in moonstuff, blending
with the birch to be both here
and not here, lose interest in us and descend
below the reach of roots. The hydro wires
are hydro wires, the streets are streets, the houses
full of television. On tombstones
names and dates are fading into vague
depressions, or else (not impossibly)
we have forgotten how to read. Who can say
if these are names or simply the effect
of weather on the stone, and if they were,
what possible connection they would have to persons
rumoured to have once gone to and fro? No one,
says Yeats, but no one
is born at this phase, whose only
incarnation is the dark. Possibly this is the hole
the Fool (phase 28) falls into –
so I reflect as,
taking the path among the evergreens,
I lose my way – the way I know like the back
of my own hand – which is busy fending off
the clutchings of the spruce – the very spruce I planted
forty years ago – and wind up
besnaggled in the dark and many-needled wood
which is mythless
which is pathless
which is mine.
SONG FOR THE SONG OF THE COYOTE
Moondogs, moondogs,
tell me the difference between tricks
and wisdom, hunting
and grieving.
I listen in the tent, my ear
to the ground. There is a land even
more bare than this one, without sage,
or prickly pear, or greasewood. A land
that can only wear its scars, every crater
etched. Riverless. Treeless. You sing to its thin
used-up light, yips and floated tremolos and screams,
sculpted barks like fastballs of packed
air. Echoes that articulate the buttes and coulees and dissolve
into the darkness, which is always listening.
LOAD
We think this
the fate of mammals – to bear, be born,
be burden, to carry our own bones
as far as we can and know the force that earths us
intimately. Sometimes, while I was reading,
Sam would bestow one large paw on my foot,
as if to support my body
while its mind was absent – mute
commiseration, load to load, a message
like the velvet heaviness which comes
; to carry you deliciously
asleep.
One morning
on the beach at Point Pelee, I met
a White-throated Sparrow so exhausted from the flight
across Lake Erie it just huddled in itself
as I crouched a few yards off.
I was thinking of the muscles in that grey-white breast,
pectoralis major powering each downstroke,
pectoralis minor with its rope-and-pulley tendon
reaching through the shoulder to the
top side of the humerus to haul it up again;
of the sternum with the extra keel it has evolved to
anchor all that effort, of the dark wind
and the white curl on he waves below, the slow dawn
and the thickening shoreline.
I wanted
very much to stroke it, and recalling
several terrors of my brief
and trivial existence, didn’t.
ICARUS
isn’t sorry. We do not find him
doing penance, writing out the golden mean for all
eternity, or touring its high schools to tell student bodies
not to do what he done
done. Over and over he rehearses flight
and fall, tuning his moves, entering
with fresh rush into the mingling of the air
with spirit. This is his practice
and his prayer: to be translated into air, as air
with each breath enters lungs,
then blood. He feels resistance gather in his stiff
strange wings, angles his arms to shuck the sweet lift
from the drag, runs the full length
of a nameless corridor, his feet striking the paving stones
less and less heavily, then