Camber

by Don McKay

  they’re bicycling above the ground,

  a few shallow beats and he’s up,

  he’s out of the story and into the song.

  At the melting point of wax, which now he knows

  the way Doug Harvey knows the blue line,

  he will back-beat to create a pause, hover for maybe fifty

  hummingbird heartbeats and then

  lose it, tumbling into freefall, shedding feathers

  like a lover shedding clothes. He may glide

  in the long arc of a Tundra swan or pull up sharp

  to Kingfisher into the sea which bears his name. Then,

  giving it the full Ophelia, drown.

  On the shore

  the farmer ploughs his field, the dull ship

  sails away, the poets moralize about our

  unsignificance. But Icarus is thinking tremolo and

  backflip, is thinking

  next time with a half-twist

  and a tuck and isn’t

  sorry.

  *

  Repertoire, technique. The beautiful contraptions bred from ingenuity and practice, and the names by which he claims them, into which – lift-off, loop-the-loop – they seem to bloom. Icarus could write a book. Instead he will stand for hours in that musing half-abstracted space, watching. During fall migrations he will often climb to the edge of a north-south running ridge where the soaring hawks find thermals like naturally occurring laughter, drawing his eyebeam up an unseen winding stair until they nearly vanish in the depth of sky. Lower down, Merlins slice the air with wings that say crisp crisp, precise as sushi chefs, while Sharp-shins alternately glide and flap, hunting as they go, each line break poised, ready to pivot like a point guard or Robert Creeley. Icarus notices how the Red-tails and Broadwings separate their primaries to spill a little air, giving up just enough lift to break their drag up into smaller trailing vortices. What does this remind him of? He thinks of the kind of gentle teasing that can dissipate a dark mood so it slips off as a bunch of skirmishes and quirks. Maybe that. Some little gift to acknowledge the many claims of drag and keep its big imperative at bay. Icarus knows all about that one too.

  *

  In the spring he heads for a slough and makes himself a blind out of wolf willow and aspen, then climbs inside to let the marsh-mind claim his thinking. The soft splashdowns of Scaup and Bufflehead, the dives which are simple shrugs and vanishings; the Loon’s wing, thin and sharp for flying in the underwater world, and the broad wing of the Mallard, powerful enough to break the water’s grip with one sweep, a guffaw which lifts it straight up into the air. Icarus has already made the mistake of trying this at home, standing on a balustrade in the labyrinth and fanning like a manic punkah, the effort throwing him backward off his perch and into a mock urn which the Minotaur had, more than once, used as a pisspot. Another gift of failure. Now his watching is humbler, less appropriative, a thoughtless thinking amid fly drone and dragonfly dart. Icarus will stay in the blind until his legs cramp up so badly that he has to move. He is really too large to be a foetus for more than an hour. He unbends creakily, stretches, and walks home, feeling gravity’s pull upon him as a kind of wealth.

  *

  Sometimes Icarus dreams back into his early days with Daedalus in the labyrinth. Then he reflects upon the Minotaur, how seldom they saw him – did they ever? – while they shifted constantly from no-place to no-place, setting up false campsites and leaving decoy models of themselves. Sometimes they would come upon these replicas in strange postures, holding their heads in their laps or pointing to their private parts. Once they discovered two sticks stuck like horns in a decoy’s head, which Daedalus took to be the worst of omens. Icarus was not so sure.

  For today’s replay he imagines himself sitting in a corridor reflecting on life as a minotaur (The Minotaur) while waiting for his alter ego to come bumbling by. They were, he realizes, both children of technology – one its enfant terrible, the other the rash adolescent who, they will always say, should never have been given a pilot’s license in the first place. What will happen when they finally meet? Icarus imagines dodging like a Barn swallow, throwing out enough quick banter to deflect his rival’s famous rage and pique his interest. How many minotaurs does it take to screw in a light bulb? What did the Queen say to the machine?

  Should he wear two sticks on his head, or save that for later? He leaps ahead to scenes out of the Hardy Boys and Tom Sawyer. They will chaff and boast and punch each other on the arm. They will ridicule the weird obsessions of their parents. As they ramble, cul-de-sacs turn into secret hideouts and the institutional corridors take on the names of birds and athletes. They discover some imperfections in the rock face, nicks and juts which Daedalus neglected to chisel off, and which they will use to climb, boosting and balancing each other until they fall off. Together they will scheme and imagine. Somehow they will find a way to put their brute heads in the clouds.

  BEFORE THE MOON

  was a moon,

  before it fisted itself into otherness inside the

  body of the earth, bulbed,

  broke out on its own,

  there was no second gravity and no

  dark art of reflection. The sun owned

  all the media and it occurred to no one to resist

  its health-and-fitness

  propaganda. Whatever a thing was,

  that was it, no ifs or

  airspace. Place was obese

  before the moon was moon, so full of itself

  there was no leaving home, and so

  no dwelling in it either. Longing was short

  and sedentary. Blues were red. No sweet tug

  toward our manic possibilities, no wistful,

  sidelong, inner, sly, no alder branch

  hung above the smooth rush of the snow-fed river like the

  stray wisp hovering against your cheek which

  in a moment you will tuck back

  into tidiness, no such stretched connection before

  moon was moon. No way to deflect the light

  away from photosynthesis and into alcohol

  and film. Each night

  was the same night, and fell formlessly,

  with no imagination,

  and without you in it.

  HOMING

  That things should happen

  twice, and place

  share the burden of remembering. Home,

  the first cliché. We say it

  with aspiration as the breath

  opens to a room of its own (a bed,

  a closet for the secret self), then closes

  on a hum. Home. Which is the sound of time

  braking a little, growing slow and thick as the soup

  that simmers on the stove. Abide,

  abode. Pass me that plate,

  the one with the hand-painted habitant

  sitting on a log. My parents bought it

  on their honeymoon – see? Dated on the bottom,

  1937. He has paused to smoke his pipe, the tree

  half-cut and leaning. Is he thinking where

  to build his cabin or just idling his mind

  while his pipe smoke mingles with the air? A bird,

  or something (it is hard to tell), hangs overhead.

  Now it’s covered by your grilled cheese sandwich.

  Part two, my interpretation. The leaning tree

  points home, then

  past home into real estate and its innumerable

  Kodak moments: kittens, uncles,

  barbecues. And behind those scenes the heavy

  footstep on the stair, the face locked

  in the window frame, things that happen

  and keep happening, reruns

  of family romance. And the smudged bird? I say it’s

  a Yellow Warbler who has flown

  from winter habitat in South America to nest here

  in the clearing. If we catch it, band it,

  let it go a thousand miles away
it will be back

  within a week. How?

  Home is what we know

  and know we know, the intricately

  feathered nest. Homing

  asks the question.

  ANGLE OF ATTACK

  You may openly

  endorse the air, but if you can’t

  be canny, and, come to that, apt,

  chances are you won’t

  get off the ground.

  We audited

  our raw materials: a lawn chair,

  an abandoned stroller and a snarl

  of coat hangers – necks, hooks, elbows –

  wrangling. Handles and

  clock hands. How-to’s on migration guided

  by the stars, by the earth’s

  electromagnetism, by the ultra-low groans

  spoken by the mountains. Now

  we needed duct tape, a philosophy of feathers

  and a plan: what to

  fall for, gracefully,

  and without too much

  deliberation, how to mix

  the mysticism with the ash and live

  next door to nothing,

  and with art.

  NOCTURNAL MIGRANTS

  Another gravity. I am on my way

  to the bathroom, the dream in my head still

  struggling not to die into the air, when my bare feet step

  into a pool of moonlight on the kitchen floor and turn,

  effortlessly, into fish. All day surviving in the grim purdah

  of my work socks wishing only to be kissed by cold

  equivocal light, now they swim off,

  up, singing old bone river, hunched-up toes

  and gormless ankles growing

  sleek and silver, old bone river,

  gather me back.

  On pause in my kitchen,

  footless, I think of them up there among the night fliers –

  Snow geese, swans, songbirds –

  navigating by the stars and earth’s own

  brainwaves. How early radar techs discovered

  ghostly blotches on their screens and,

  knowing they weren’t aircraft – theirs

  or ours – called them angels. Back in my dream

  the old lady who sells popcorn has been fading in my arms

  as I run through its corridors and lobbies, taking her

  empty weight through foyers, antechambers,

  vestibules, a whole aerobics class completely deaf

  inside its trance of wellness, my old

  popcorn lady dwindling to a feather boa,

  then a scarf of smoke. A gravity

  against the ground, a love

  which summons no one home

  and calls things to their water-souls. On the tide flats

  shore birds feed and bustle, putting on fat

  for the next leg of the long

  throw south. When a cold front

  crosses the Fundy coast, they test it

  with their feathers, listening to its muscular

  northwesterlies, deciding when to give their bodies

  to that music and be swept,

  its ideal audience, far out over the Atlantic. The face

  in the bathroom mirror looks up

  just as I arrive, a creature that has

  caught me watching and is watching back. Around us

  wind has risen, rushes in the foliage,

  tugs at the house.

  SNOW MOON

  (January: Fredericton, New Brunswick)

  With no name

  and no mask. Not the dusty rock,

  not the goddess, not the decor of romance,

  not the face. Express from infinity

  it arrives in a flood of cold desire like a

  tooth, like a voracious

  reader. The snow wakes singing, its empty angels

  filling with invisible silica, quickening

  to fly off as Snowy owls.

  The mind of winter.

  This moon who refuses to defer,

  whose light is the death of fire and the silence of the loon,

  whose song can snap off ears.

  KINDS OF BLUE #41 (FAR HILLS)

  Viola, cello, double bass, the distances

  deepen and address us. What is this language

  we have almost learnt, or nearly not

  forgotten, with its soft

  introspective consonants, its drone

  of puréed names? It says we ought to mourn

  but not to grieve, it says that even loss

  may be a place, it says

  repose. The eye would like to fold its rainbow

  like a fan, and quit

  discriminating between this and that,

  and indigo and mauve,

  and go there. Once,

  while sleeping in my down-filled sleeping bag

  I dreamt of Eiders, diving

  and diving into the dark Arctic Ocean, and woke

  bereft and happy, my whole mind

  applauding.

  SONG FOR THE SONG OF THE WHITE-THROATED SPARROW

  Before it can stop itself, the mind

  has leapt up inferences, crag to crag,

  the obvious arpeggio. Where there is a doorbell

  there must be a door – a door

  meant to be opened from inside.

  Door means house means – wait a second –

  but already it is standing on a threshold previously

  known to be thin air, gawking. The Black Spruce

  point to it: clarity,

  melting into ordinary morning, true

  north. Where the sky is just a name,

  a way to pitch a little tent in space and sleep

  for five unnumbered seconds.

  CAMBER

  That rising curve, the fine line

  between craft and magic where we

  travel uphill without effort, where anticipation,

  slipping into eros,

  summons the skin. When you

  say “you” with that inflection something stirs

  inside the word, echo

  infected with laugh. One night O., gazing at the moon

  as usual, encountered K. as he was trying to outwalk

  bureaucracy. Yes, they said, let’s. If it is

  possible to translate poetry, then,

  what isn’t?

  GLIDE

  Sometimes the eye brims

  over with desire and pours

  into its flight path:

  this is gaze, and glide

  is when the body follows,

  flowing into river, when the heart,

  turning the word “forever”

  into plainsong,

  learns to purr, knowing

  the most important

  lesson of grade four

  is the blank but pointed

  page, the pure wish that we

  sharpen into dart and send

  skimming the desks and out

  the window, through the schoolyard

  with its iron jungle gym, across

  the traffic we must always

  stop and look both

  ways for, meanwhile, gazing

  at us from its prehistoric perch, a small

  but enterprising lizard

  is about to launch itself

  into the warm arms of the Mesozoic afternoon.

  WINGS OF SONG

  We talk because we are mortal.

  – Octavio Paz

  And because we aren’t gods,

  or close to gods,

  we sing. Your breath steps

  boldly into lift to feel that other breath

  breathing inside it: Summertime, Amazing Grace.

  And when it stops

  you sense that something fold back

  into air to leave you listening,

  lonely as a post. Shall we call this angel?

  Shall we call it animal, or elf? Most of us

  are happy with a bri
ef

  companionable ghost who joins us in the shower or

  behind the wheel. Blue Moon, Hound Dog, Life

  Is Like a Mountain Railroad. When your voice

  decides to quit its day job, which is mostly

  door-to-door, to take its little sack of sounds

  and pour them into darkness, with its

  unembodied barks and murmurs, its refusal

  to name names, its disregard for sentences,

  for getting there on time,

  or getting there,

  or getting.

  HOVER

  What goes up

  improvises, makes itself a shelf out of nowt,

  out of ether and work, ushering the air, backstroke

  after backstroke, underneath

  the earth turns and you

  don’t, and don’t,

  and don’t: O

  who do you think you are so

  hugely paused, pissing off both

  gravity and time,

  refusing to be born into the next

  inexorable instant?

  We wait in our

  pocket of held breath, secretly

  cheering you on.

  Do it for us.

  HANG TIME

  Some say it’s the blip

  produced when missing heartbeats – from the terrible half-

  expected phone call or the child who wasn’t where you

  thought she was – sneak back into flow

  and get assimilated. Some say

  sunspots. Either way, evidence of eddies

  in the ever-rolling stream, a gift to the wingless which

  increases our capacity to yearn

  and taste for tricks. You have a strange expression

  on your face, as though

  walking a long corridor of doors, trying each one,

  1324, No Entry, 1326, one of these

  has got to be the way up

  to the roof.

  TURBULENCE

  There is at present no precise definition of turbulence, although we can say that velocity exhibits finite oscillations of a random character that cause irregularities in the path of a suspended particle of scale comparable with the lengths that determine the kinematics of the mean motion, we can say