Camber

by Don McKay

  vortices

  eddies

  coefficient of drag

  we can say agitated

  particles, we can say at present no,

  at present there is precious

  deformation, the ferocity exhibits final

  oscar nominations of those random

  characters, the claws, irregulars, the plaths of suspense,

  the partisans of sale, the compost rabble

  and the lynx that undermines, we can say

  killer statics of mean motion, dwarf diseases,

  all the eds and eddies and the sad

  co-fishermen of drag, the agitated

  hearts and hearticles of what

  we cannot say there is at present.

  UFO

  Leaving home loves homing: you can scrawl that

  in the washroom, carve it in the old oak, carry it

  inside your carry-on

  luggage. When I comprehend the tragi-comic

  turns and nude scenes of their long

  romance it’s going to explain

  plenty, from the strange behaviours of the dead

  to why I do the dishes happily

  and badly. In the cemetery by the sea

  the Chestnut-backed chickadees kibitz and flit, Yew

  to Douglas-fir to Weeping

  birch. They must be the selves

  of dear departed ones, still full of just

  a minute while I put the kettle on and doctors,

  what do they know. Wearing their

  tangibility and pluck, their fresh

  capacity for being sorely missed. Wearing the way

  you sang off key like a new plaid

  sports coat. While those others, the cherished

  and exquisite rumours of the spirit, soar through our

  imaginations with the dumb nonchalance

  of albatrosses. Sometimes I listen

  much too closely to the crows,

  especially those who perch on the neon signs

  and rooftops of the plaza, where they

  parley in the voices of burnt

  oboes, boldface and illegible.

  They know something. Something

  about scavenging and shopping and the interwoven

  deerpaths of desire. Something about loss

  made visible. Homing loves leaving

  home. When I comprehend that wing.

  When I run off with that heartless music.

  PLUMMET

  Simple.

  Under one wing you take the thousand thousand

  thuds of your heart, under the other

  a lifetime paying taxes to the wind –

  and clench.

  Where there was flibbertigibbetry of feather, now

  the quick of existence in a fist.

  Where there was phrase, phrase, nickel-and-diming it to stay

  one breath ahead, now

  you take the full stop in your teeth

  the plumb bob

  the bomb.

  Where there were unnumbered paths of air, now

  the one shaft of your plunge, whose walls

  are the shrieks of your old nemesis, gravity

  bursting into bloom.

  SOMETIMES A VOICE (2)

  Sometimes a voice – have you heard this? –

  wants not to be voice any longer and this longing

  is the worst of longings. Nothing

  assuages. Not the curry-comb of conversation,

  not the dog-eared broken

  satisfactions of the blues. It huddles in the lungs

  and won’t come out. Not for the Mendelssohn Choir

  constructing habitable spaces in the air, not for Yeats

  intoning “Song of the Old Mother” to an ancient

  microphone. It curls up in its cave

  and will not stir. Not for the gentle quack

  of saxophone, not for raven’s far-calling

  croak. Not for oh the lift of poetry, or ah

  the lover’s sigh, or um the phrase’s lost

  left shoe. It tucks its nose beneath its brush

  and won’t. If her whisper tries

  to pollinate your name, if a stranger yells

  hey kid, va t’en chez toi to set another music

  going in your head it simply

  enters deafness. Nothing

  assuages. Maybe it is singing

  high in the cirque, burnishing itself

  against the rockwall, maybe it is

  clicking in the stones turned by the waves like faceless

  dice. Have you heard this? – in the hush

  of invisible feathers as they urge the dark,

  stroking it toward articulation? Or the moment

  when you know it’s over and the nothing which you

  have to say is falling all around you, lavishly,

  pouring its heart out.

  FINGER POINTING AT THE MOON

  We come from a hidden ocean, and we go to an unknown ocean.

  – Antonio Machado

  Everything you think of has already happened

  and been sung by the sea. We were hiking

  along the coast, with the hush and boom of surf

  in our ears, on a trail so wet it was mostly

  washouts strung together, forcing us

  to find fresh ways around, teetery

  and nimble, until I thought, yes,

  the real agenda of this so-called trail

  is not to lead us through this sopping biomass

  but into it, with the surf

  as soundtrack. Everything you think, it sang,

  has already happened and been sung in long

  confessional sighs and softly

  crashing dactyls, wash, rinse,

  wash, useless to resist. Each wave,

  having travelled incognito through its ocean,

  surges up to rush the rock, Homer was here, and perish,

  famous and forgotten. On the beach

  the back-drag clicks the stones and pebbles

  on each other, a death rattle that is somehow soothing, somehow

  music, some drum kit from the far side of the blues

  where loss begins to shuffle. It’s O.K. to disappear. Off balance,

  I’m trying to hop from stepping stone to stone

  when I flash back forty years to my friend’s

  younger sister sitting in the boat,

  trailing her fingers as we row out to the raft, how she gazes,

  pouring herself into water as its depth

  pours into her. I remember

  being embarrassed she’d been caught out

  having an inner life and rowed hard for the raft

  where summer fun was waiting with its brawny cannonballs

  and swan dives. I think each memory is lit

  by its own small moon – a snowberry,

  a mothball, a dime – which regulates its tides

  and longings. Next time I am going to lift the oars

  so we can watch the droplets fall back,

  hidden ocean into unknown ocean,

  while we drift. I will need a word

  to float there, some empty blue-green bottle

  that has lost its label. When we lose the trail entirely,

  or it feeds us to the rain forest,

  what will we be like? Probably not the Winter wren,

  whose impossible song is the biography of Buddha,

  then Mary Shelley, then your no-good Uncle Ray.

  Not the Cat-tail Moss

  which hangs in drapes and furs the fallen logs in lavish

  sixties shag. I think we come here so our words

  can fail us, get humbled by the stones, drown,

  be lost forever, then come back

  as beach glass, polished and anonymous,

  knowing everything. Knowing everything they

  think of has already happened, everything they think of has

  already happened and been sung, knowing


  everything they think of has already happened and been sung,

  in all its tongues and metres, and to no one,

  by the sea.

  WINTER SOLSTICE MOON: AN ECLOGUE

  (December: Pacific Rim National Park)

  Full moon falling on Christmas eve: I wondered,

  as we carried our supplies – wine, rain gear, gifts –

  from the car to the cabin, whether everything was

  about to get conscripted into either family life

  or lunacy. We put

  the perishables in the fridge,

  walked out on the beach: in the east

  the blacker blackness of the mountains, already backlit

  by the moon, and lower down each cabin’s roof

  outlined in lights, reminding everyone that this

  was supposed to be the feast of homes

  and homebodies, the time to bring a tree indoors

  and charm its boreal heart with bric-a-brac,

  to make ourselves so interesting its needles would forget

  the roots they left behind. On the wet

  corrugated sand the lights were smeared and

  rippled, an elaborate film noir effect,

  an opening sequence into which a cop car,

  like an urban orca, should intrude. To the west

  ocean was a far roar under its hush-hush

  in the sand, a giant with a lisp.

  I was thinking of the house we’d left

  huddled darkly round its

  turned-down furnace, one missing tooth

  in the block’s electric smile. How much

  we ask of them, that they articulate

  the space around us into stanzas,

  pauses in the flow which gather time,

  or rather where time, slightly pregnant,

  might gather if it chose; that they should be the bodies

  of our bodies and the spirit’s husk

  against the hypothermia which dogs it,

  a.k.a. the dreads; that they be resolute yet intimate, insulated,

  pest-free, dry, well-founded in the earth but airy,

  fire in the belly and a good deep well attached to copper

  plumbing, CSA approved; that they should be

  possessed of character but not by ghosts, and not

  the sort of character who wakes you

  in the middle of the night and suddenly

  needs money; that they should shed the rain and keep the wind

  from blowing out the candle flame of talk, the bedtime stories,

  murmurings, the small redundant phrases with which one voice

  solaces another.

  And when it goes awry – the cracks the bills the noise the

  drains the silences the bugs – to take the blame and sit there,

  stoically, on the market while new dreamers sniff the air

  and poke their noses into closets,

  hatching their improbable plots.

  We walked through soft mist,

  filling our ears with the ocean’s boom

  and whisper. Is it the listening that loosens,

  letting its knots go, or the voice,

  saying those great unsayings to itself until

  ovation on the inside equals ovation out? And rain forest,

  I thought as we turned back at the cliff,

  must be the way it gets translated into plants,

  who remember water with each rounded,

  downward gesture.

  Then the moon. Over the mountain it hung

  and roiled inside itself,

  pure style which took the scene aslant, selecting

  the bristle of frost on the drift logs, the patch

  of duct tape on my boot, the whites of your eyes,

  leaving whatever was not glimmering in deeper shadow,

  uninhabited. Can you recall

  those nights we spent learning from the wolves to be

  the tooth and tongue of darkness, how to hunt

  and howl? Me neither. Now that howl’s

  inverted in us, the long o of alone. The wolves

  are dogs. The sun says here, the moon says

  nowhere, the nameless moon

  that sheds the blunt domesticating myths

  the way a mirror utterly forgets you

  when you leave the bathroom, the empty moon

  soliciting our ghosts, calling on them to leave home,

  that gilded cage, that theme park of the human.

  But the sea was gazing back, its look

  rich with tumult and the possibility of huge hearts

  sounding the depths. Between them

  otherworldliness is quickened. One theory –

  my favourite – goes that once the earth and moon were one,

  spinning monthlessly in space, and somehow –

  whether by asteroid

  or apple, différance, tabu – they broke up and the moon,

  newly fallen, risen, floated off into its orbit, while

  into the crater of its absence flowed

  the greater tear known as the Pacific Ocean.

  So:

  a story full of loss and eros, three-fifths

  of the way to myth. Let’s leave it there – something human,

  homespun, like a basket, a translation, or a loaf of bread –

  beside the incandescent water. Our cabin sat

  under its little party hat of lights, and to it,

  wanting its warmth, and supper, and to give our gifts,

  we went.

  ON LEAVING

  Leaving home is the beginning of resemblance.

  – David Seymour

  On leaving, you circulate among the things you own

  to say farewell, properly,

  knowing they will not cease to exist

  after your departure, but go,

  slowly, each in its own way,

  wild.

  So long and thanks, with one last chop, tap,

  twiddle. It won’t work just to

  flip them into negatives – minus T-shirt, minus Roger

  Tory Peterson both east and west –

  nor to convert them into liquid

  assets. This is no yard sale, this is loss,

  whose interior is larger than its shell, the way you wish

  home was. Do not dig the dog’s bones up

  nor the rosebush by the porch.

  Choose a few companions of no weight –

  a crow feather found in the parking lot,

  the strawsmell of her hair, a few

  books of the dead, 1000

  Best Loved Puns. And leave. There is a loneliness

  which must be entered rather than resolved, the moon’s

  pull on the roof which made those asphalt shingles

  shine. A time for this,

  a time for that, a time to let them both escape into

  whateverness, a time to cast

  away stones, to stop

  building and remembering and building artful

  monuments upon the memories.

  To leave.

  To step off into darker darkness,

  that no moon we call new.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I have, over the years, been fortunate in having excellent readers attend to my work. Thanks to Roo Borson, Robert Bringhurst, Barry Dempster, Stan Dragland, Dennis Lee, Tim Lilburn, and Kim Maltman for this long-term listening. As always, I am especially indebted to Jan Zwicky.

  Thanks also are due to the magazines, some still active, some having passed on to little-mag heaven (where there ain’t no typos and the Canada Council makes house calls), that first printed these poems, and have been perennial sustainers of poetry. I hope this list (east to west) is reasonably complete: TickleAce, The Fiddlehead, Pottersfield Portfolio, Windhorse, Matrix, Quarry, Poetry Canada Review, Arc, The Canadian Forum, Exile, Brick, Descant, Saturday Night, Harvest, Impulse, Tics, Eclipse, Applegarth’s Folly, Stuffed Crocod
ile, Prairie Fire, Grain, Dandelion, Event, and The Malahat Review.

  Among literary presses let me again thank the chapbook publishers – Reference West, Outlaw Editions, and Trout Lily – as well as Brick Books, Coach House, and of course everyone at McClelland & Stewart for supporting Canadian poetry over the years. Special thanks to Ellen Seligman, Anita Chong, and Peter Buck at M&S.

  Some of these poems were written with particular people in mind. Let me just mention “Bird Thou Never Wert” (John McKay), “Simply Because Light” (Jean McKay), “Night Skating on the Little Paddle River” (Bob Zwicky), “Suddenly, at home” (Naomi McKay Sharpe), “Setting Up the Drums” (Andy Miller), “To Danceland” (Margaret McKay), “Finger Pointing at the Moon” (Jane Clement Chamberlin), “Wings of Song” (Stan Dragland), and “Another Theory of Dusk” (Jan Zwicky).

  A couple of these poems (“But Nature Has Her Darker Side” and “On Seeing the First Turkey Vultures of Spring”) have sustained minor revisions. The prologue poem was written to introduce this book.