BOOKS BY DON McKAY
POETRY
Air Occupies Space 1973
Long Sault 1975
Lependu 1978
Lightning Ball Bait 1980
Birding, or desire 1983
Sanding Down This Rocking Chair on a Windy Night 1987
Night Field 1991
Apparatus 1997
Another Gravity 2000
Camber: Selected Poems 1983-2000 2004
Strike/Slip 2006
Paradoxides 2012
ESSAYS
Vis à vis: Fieldnotes on Poetry and Wilderness 2001
Deactivated West 100 2005
Copyright © 2004 by Don McKay
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
McKay, Don, 1942-
Camber : selected poems, 1983-2000 / Don McKay.
ISBN 978-0-7710-5765-6
eBook ISBN: 978-1-55199-667-7
I. Title.
PS8575.K28A6 2004 C811′.54 C2003-906866-8
Published simultaneously in the United States of America by McClelland & Stewart Ltd., P.O. Box 1030, Plattsburgh, New York 12901 Library of Congress Control Number: 2004381225
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.
McClelland & Stewart Ltd.
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v3.1
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Disclaimer Page
I Birding, or desire and early poems
Field Marks
Close-up on a Sharp-shinned Hawk
The Great Blue Heron
Dusk
I scream you scream
Nocturnal Animals
Fridge Nocturne
Bird Thou Never Wert
The Boy’s Own Guide to Dream Birds
Simply because light
Sparrows
Alias Rock Dove, Alias Holy Ghost
Gynaecology
Our Last Black Cat
On Seeing the First Turkey Vultures of Spring
Longing
A Toast to the Baltimore Oriole
Adagio for a Fallen Sparrow
“The bellies of fallen breathing sparrows”
A Barbed-Wire Fence Meditates upon the Goldfinch
Field Marks (2)
Kestrels
White Pine
To sing and feed
Mourning Doves
August
Listen at the edge
Pausing by moonlight beside a field of dandelions gone to seed
The Tire Swing
Blood
But Nature Has Her Darker Side
II Sanding Down This Rocking Chair on a Windy Night
The Wind Chill Factor
Snow Thickening on the Trans-Canada Highway
Midwintering
Drinking Lake Superior
Via, Eastbound
Summer at Leith
Softball
Midnight Dip
Some functions of a leaf
Lost Sisters
The Night Shift
Dixieland Contraption Blues
Deep Vein Thrombosis
Trouble in Paradise
Edge of Night
Talk’s End
III Night Field
Song for Wild Phlox
Meditation on Blue
Choosing the Bow
Recipe for Divertimento in D, K: 136
Bone Poems
Nocturne Macdonald-Cartier Freeway
Waking at the Mouth of the Willow River
Meditation in an Uncut Cornfield, November
The Dumpe
Night Field
Moth Fear
Meditation on Shovels
Domestic Animals
Song for the Restless Wind
Night Skating on the Little Paddle River
Poplar
Luke & Co.
Another Theory of Dusk
Meditation on Snow Clouds Approaching the University from the Northwest
IV Apparatus
Early Instruments
Twinflower
To Speak of Paths
Glenn Gould, humming
Song for Beef Cattle
Camouflage
Big Alberta Clouds
Alibi
Kinds of Blue #76 (Evening Snow)
Hospital Zone
Rain, rain, rain
Song for the song of the Varied Thrush
Song for the song of the Wood Thrush
The Laugh
Suddenly, at home
Après La Bohème
What Kind of Fool Am I?
Matériel
I. The Man from Nod
II. Fates Worse Than Death
III. The Base
IV. Stretto
Meditation on Antique Glass
Short Fat Flicks
1. He rides into town
2. Their eyes meet
3. We take our seats
Ode to My Car
Setting Up the Drums
Acoustics of the Conical Tube
Setting the Table
1. Knife
2. Fork
3. Spoon
Abandoned Tracks: an eclogue
To Danceland
V Another Gravity
Sometimes a Voice (1)
Lift
Drag
Dark of the Moon
Song for the song of the coyote
Load
Icarus
Before the Moon
Homing
Angle of Attack
Nocturnal Migrants
Snow Moon
Kinds of Blue #41 (Far Hills)
Song for the song of the White-throated Sparrow
Camber
Glide
Wings of Song
Hover
Hang Time
Turbulence
UFO
Plummet
Sometimes a Voice (2)
Finger Pointing at the Moon
Winter Solstice Moon: an eclogue
On Leaving
Acknowledgements
This title contains long lines of poetry. The line of characters below indicates approximately the longest line in the text:
sharpening to something like the afterlife of music moving in an
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Lifting off, letting go, seizing leave as though
de
parture were the first act ever, stepping
into air as sigh, as outbreath, hum,
commotion, whirr,
it’s out of here, it’s shucked us like
high school, like some stiff
unfolding wings.
And already we are saying
let there be, let there be
liftoff, let there be loss, let there be those
silver knives that swim in blood like sharpened
fingerlings, those tossed-off
warbler phrases that dissolve in air before
the voice can manage to corral them, that exquisite thirst
whose satisfaction is another,
larger thirst equipped with claws like question marks requiring
answers in the form of still another thirst and
though we recognize this evil as our own we also
recognize the camber of its nothing as it
lifts, as it glances,
as it vanishes.
I
FIELD MARKS
Distinguished from the twerp,
which he resembles, by his off-speed
concentration: shh:
bursting with sneakiness
he will tiptoe through our early morning drowse
like the villain in an old cartoon, pick up
binoculars, bird book, dog,
orange, letting the fridge lips close behind him with a kiss.
Everything,
even the station-wagon, will be
delicate with dew –
bindweed, spiderweb, sumac,
Queen Anne’s lace: he slides
among them as a wish, attempting to become
a dog’s nose of receptiveness.
Later on he’ll come back as the well-known bore
and read his list (Song sparrows: 5
Brown thrashers: 2
Black-throated green warblers: 1) omitting
all the secret data hatching on the far side of his mind:
that birds have sinuses throughout their bodies,
and that their bones are flutes
that soaring turkey vultures can detect
depression and careless driving
that every feather is a pen, but living,
flying
CLOSE-UP ON A SHARP-SHINNED HAWK
Concentrate upon her attributes:
the accipiter’s short
rounded wings, streaked breast, talons fine
and slender as the x-ray of a baby’s hand.
The eyes (yellow in this hatchling
later deepening to orange then
blood red) can spot
a sparrow at four hundred metres and impose
silence like an overwhelming noise
to which you must not listen.
Suddenly, if you’re not careful, everything
goes celluloid and slow
and threatens to burn through and you
must focus quickly on the simple metal band around her leg
by which she’s married to our need to know.
THE GREAT BLUE HERON
What I remember
about the Great Blue Heron that rose
like its name over the marsh
is touching and holding that small
manyveined
wrist
upon the gunwale, to signal silently –
look
The Great Blue Heron
(the birdboned wrist).
DUSK:
the slow
rollover of evening, the spruce
growing dense, gathering dark,
standing in pools of departure.
Take care … Remember …
we are weaving a wreath of human hair
to be left to the Huron County Museum
with a short note saying who
contributed and where they come from.
Shadows sadden.
The details of your face escape like minnows.
We become weight –
until the balance tips entirely and a bat
breaks out like a butterfly’s subconscious flashing,
dancing his own black rag.
I SCREAM YOU SCREAM
Waking JESUS sudden riding a scream like a
train braking metal on metal on
metal teeth receiving signals from a dying star sparking
off involuntarily in terror in all directions in the
abstract incognito in my
maidenform bra in an expanding universe in a where’s
my syntax thrashing
loose like a grab that like a
look out like a
live wire in a hurricane until
until I finally tie it down:
it is a pig scream
a pig scream from the farm across the road
that tears this throat of noise into the otherwise anonymous dark,
a noise not oink or grunt
but a passage blasted through constricted pipes, perhaps
a preview of the pig’s last noise.
Gathering again toward sleep I sense
earth’s claim on the pig.
Pig grew, polyped out on the earth like a boil
and broke away.
But earth
heals all flesh back beginning with her pig,
filling his throat with silt and sending
subtle fingers for him like the meshing fibres in a wound
like roots
like grass growing on a grave like a snooze
in the sun like fur-lined boots that seize
the feet like his nostalgie de la boue like
having another glass of booze like a necktie like a
velvet noose like a nurse
like sleep.
NOCTURNAL ANIMALS
Another cup of coffee. Southern Ontario
surrounds this kitchen like well-fed flesh.
If I had
a cigarette right now I’d smoke it like an angry campfire
burn it into the unblemished body of the night.
Lonely is a knife whose handle fits the mind
too well, its oldest and most hospitable friend.
On Highway 22
a truck is howling for Sarnia or London.
In my garage
the aging Buick is dreaming the commercial
in which he frees my spirit into speed while an eagle
in slow motion
beats applause above our heads.
Another cup of coffee.
Two years ago the wolves took shape
in Lobo Township, lifting the tombstone of its name
to lope across these snowy fields
between the woodlots
spectral
legless as wind, their nostrils
wide with news of an automated pig barn
waiting for them like an all-night restaurant.
Shot, their bodies wisped away, their eyes
stubbed out.
FRIDGE NOCTURNE
When it is late, and sleep,
off somewhere tinkering with his motorcycle, leaves you
locked in your iron birdhouse,
listen to your fridge, the old
armless weeping willow of the kitchen.
Humble murmur, it works its way
like the river you’re far from, the Saugeen, the Goulais
the Raisin
muddily gathers itself in pools to drop things in
and fish things from,
the goodwill mission in the city of dreadful night.
BIRD THOU NEVER WERT
Remembering: the annual Community Chest Christmas Concert. Phone in your request with a donation, listen in bed to hear it on the radio, the small moon of the dial an extra presence in the dark as we gather toward Christmas. Jokes about the police chief and the high-school principals. Choirs, bands, Billy Heward played White Christmas on the trumpet. Was it the same year s
omeone (who?) paid twenty dollars to hear my father, a lapsed Kinsman, de da de dum his way through the Kinsmen Friendship Song while I lay thrilled and mortified yer old man never even knew the tune let alone the words? Might have been. At any rate I recall my father telling the story of the bird flying around the high school auditorium, fluttering wildly overhead and distracting the audience from the Ecole Immaculée Conception choir singing Frosty the Snowman. By the time the Gilbert and Sullivan star tenor took the stage the bird (sparrow? hummingbird? Blackburnian warbler?) had extended its range to buzz performers. George would be singing something Irish, his voice clenched, his face set in the abstract concentration of a constipated man, while I see the bird flashing into the spotlight, homing on this rope of sinew in the air and veering away each time just before he flies down George’s throat. The story goes that George dropped not one note nor lost an ounce of poise as he caught the bird in one hand, squeezing it to death while he launched into his climax. The story leaves me lying in the dark trying to imagine how a voice might swell with heartbeats, break, and fly away, beyond the reach of radio.
Later – My father now says:
that the concert was the Kinsmen Festival of Stars
that the singer was fourteen-year-old Vincent Delasio
that the song was O for the Wings of a Dove
that the bird was a bat
that Vincent Delasio caught the bat on his third
attempt and held it until it bit him, then flung
it to the floor in pain and fury, and that later
he was persuaded to return, bandaged, and sang
again to thunderous applause.
My father will not say whether the bat survived.
THE BOY’S OWN GUIDE TO DREAM BIRDS
Audubonless
dream birds thrive. The talking swan, the kestrels
nesting in the kitchen, undocumented citizens of teeming
terra incognita.
To write
their book the boy will need
la plume de ma tante, harfang des neiges,
patience, an ear like a cornucopia, and at least
an elementary understanding of the place of human psychology
among nature’s interlocking food chains.