For the facts are scarce
and secretive. Who is able to identify
the man in metamorphosis, becoming
half-bird on the Coldstream Road? The boy reports
a falcon’s beak both hooked and toothed, the fingers spreading,
lengthening into a vulture’s fringe, the cold eye
glaring as he lifts off from the road: look, look,
come quick!
Who sits inside and fails to hear?
What can he be doing?
Why is he so deaf?
But on another night a huge, hunched, crested
multicoloured bird, a sort of cross between eagle
and macaw, sits, sinister and gorgeous,
on our mailbox.
Now we know what happens to the letters we do not receive
from royalty, and from our secret lovers
pining in the chaste apartments of the waking world.
SIMPLY BECAUSE LIGHT
is falling a certain way through the dining-room window
I want to lapse in speech on the balcony, sprawl
in a lawn chair watching
how the shadow shoves it up the hospital wall until
it winks so long from the top-floor windows, float
words like maple keys on thick
and sleepy air.
I want memories that germinate, the things
we both thought when your mother
fell and cut her knee that time I helped her from the car,
the fight in the hotel in Edinburgh, other
fights and hotels we have known I want
the caterpillar to stop eating the thick
leaf of the evening I want
the kids to sit and reach inside themselves
to wonder at the seed they were.
I want to spread the shed years on us
as a mulch I want
unfoldings in my head like fast-growing plants in an old
Walt Disney movie about spring, do you remember?
Do you remember?
Simply because of this
I am bugging your ass in the kitchen
disparaging the dishes, slamming cupboards, flicking
bits of old no-longer-titled movies at you like the
foam from the detergent just to make you say
for christ’s sake let’s go have a beer
on the balcony instead of –
clip clop
I’ll uncap them
and we will.
SPARROWS
A movable ghetto,
bickering on the feeder: suddenly
a Blue Jay, they
scatter to the currant bushes and
regather: then to
jabber back, hardy
and unkillable clichés
chirping to beat the band
(while deep inside cacophony
their group mind takes the microphone:
non, je ne regrette rien, le grand
trombone du vent the wintry
dicta, enfin let the
space between our voices be my nom de plume).
ALIAS ROCK DOVE, ALIAS HOLY GHOST
How come you don’t see more dead pigeons?
Because when they die their bodies turn to lost gloves
and get swept up by the city sweepers. Even so
their soft inconsequence can sabotage a jumbo jet
the way a flock of empty details
devastates a marriage.
Someone down the hall is working on an epic cough.
Another makes it to the bathroom
yet again, groping past my door. All night
the senile plumbing interviews itself: some war or other.
The faint sweet smell of must.
Along the ledges of the parking garage they flutter
wanly as the grey-blue residue of nightmares.
Softness of bruises, of sponges
sopping up exhaust.
City poets try to read their tracks along the windowsill for some
announcement. Such as our concrete palaces
have the consistency of cake. Such as
Metropolis of Crumbs. Such as
Save us, Christ, the poor sons of bitches.
GYNAECOLOGY
He is conscious of his boots and dirty parka
and the superficiality of chat.
Women trundle I.V. trolleys slowly
down the corridor, flourishing clear bags of plasma,
emblems of the perfect womb.
A more than hospital softness. Sadness
of undone beginnings. Here, he thinks
we’re earlier than virgin
nakeder than nude.
Sex, a pair of shoes, is left beside the elevator.
Talk of weather: freezing rain,
could be snow tonight.
Symptoms of the world.
What can he say?
He leaves some tapes of poetry
to pour through headphones into her ears thinking
plasma
matter
feather
energy
chickadee
OUR LAST BLACK CAT
was the shadow of another cat
he couldn’t catch, though he slid through his days
without abrasion, unsurprised, surprising
everybody else, appearing
at your elbow as a sudden
hole in your attention yet
bored with his good looks and flowing
into motion he attacked his sleeping
sister licked cigar ash chased the squirrels once
he tried to screw a pumpkin surely
there is more to life.
Even in repose his eyes were cigarettes of wrath
burning into the feline condition
which enclosed him like an egg –
until at last he was surprised by a car
on Cheapside Street and his life turned
jerky as a slideshow.
Now we look him up in memory under lithe:
flexible limber pliant supple:
stiff with attributes.
ON SEEING THE FIRST TURKEY VULTURES OF SPRING
Some claim forepangs in their shoulder blades, others
that the light grows dim, or else
(too many Westerns) that air
winces to a single long drawn minor chord.
Serene, décolletés, unflappably
they circle, oval
and parabola,
an elegance, a laziness
that masks the naked ache of appetite
as distance masks the outrage that their heads are wounds.
Calling nothing, building no nests,
they lay their eggs on rock.
Everywhere they see through to the end (he shoots
her lover, dynamites the mine, leaves town),
eliminating spring as so much juice.
The Great Southwestern Ontario
Desert offers its hors d’oeuvres.
LONGING:
a term for radical unwinding of the heart, e.g.
an angel
calling his dog, a cardinal
whistling in the poplars plucks a dangling
heartstring in his beak and
flies off somewhere, carelessly
in Welsh
across the clothesline
bleeding into the trees
A TOAST TO THE BALTIMORE ORIOLE
Here’s to your good looks and the neat way you shit
with a brisk bob like a curtsey, easy as song.
Here’s to your song, which,
though “neither rhythmical nor musical” (The Birds of Canada),
relieves me of all speech and never deals with what is past,
or passing, or to come.
And, as a monument to the sturdy fragile woven
scrotum of your nest,
I hereby dedicate baseball.
ADAGIO FOR A FALLEN SP
ARROW
In the bleak midwinter
frosty wind made moan
earth was hard as iron
water like a stone
Sparrows burning
bright bright bright against the wind
resemble this item, this frozen
lump on the floor of my garage, as fire
resembles ash:
not much.
A body to dispose of,
probably one I’ve fed all winter, now
a sort of weightless fact,
an effortless repudiation of the whole shebang.
I’d like to toss it in the garbage can but can’t let go
so easily. I’d bury it
but ground is steel
and hard to find. Cremation?
Much too big a deal, too rich and bardic
too much like an ode. Why not simply splurge
and get it stuffed, perch it proudly on the shelf
with Keats and Shelley and The Birds of Canada?
But when at last
I bury it beneath three feet of snow
there is nothing to be said.
It’s very cold.
The air
has turned its edge
against us.
My bones
are an antenna picking up
arthritis, wordless keening of the dead.
So, sparrow, before drifting snow
reclaims this place for placelessness, I mark your grave
with four sticks broken from the walnut tree:
one for your fierce heart
one for your bright eye
one for the shit you shat upon my windshield
while exercising squatters’ rights in my garage
and one to tell the turkey vultures where your thawing body lies
when they return next spring to gather you
into the circling ferment of themselves.
And my last wish: that they do
before the cat discovers you and eats you, throwing up,
as usual, beside the wicker basket in the upstairs hall.
“THE BELLIES OF FALLEN BREATHING SPARROWS”
Some things can’t be praised enough, among them
breasts and birds
who have cohabited so long in metaphor
most folks think of them as married.
Not only that, but
when you slide your shirt (the striped one) off
the inside of my head is lined with down
like a Blackburnian warbler’s nest,
the exterior of which is often rough and twiggy
in appearance.
And as the shirt snags, hesitates, and then
lets go, I know exactly why he warbles as he does,
which is zip zip zip zip zeee
chickety chickety chickety chick.
The man who wrote “twin alabaster mounds”
should have spent more time outdoors
instead of browsing in that musty old museum where
he pissed away his youth.
A BARBED-WIRE FENCE MEDITATES UPON THE GOLDFINCH
More than the shortest distance
between points, we are
the Stradivarius of work.
We make the meadow meadow, make it
mean, make it yours, but till the last
insurance policy is cashed in we will
never be immune to this
exquisite cruelty:
that the knots in all our posts remember limbs
they nested and were busy in and danced per-
chic-o-ree their loops between,
that the fury of their playfulness persists
in amputated roots.
Remember us
next time the little yellow bastards lilt
across your windshield. No one
no one is above the law.
FIELD MARKS (2)
just like you and me but
cageless, likes fresh air and
wants to be his longing.
Wears extra eyes around his neck, his mind
pokes out his ears the way an Irish Setter’s nose
pokes out a station-wagon window.
His heart is suet. He would be a bird book full of
lavish illustrations with a text of metaphor.
He would know but still
be slippery in time. He would eat crow. He becomes
hyperbole, an egghead who spends days attempting to compare the
shape and texture of her thigh to a snowy egret’s neck, elegant
and all too seldom seen in Southern Ontario.
He utters absolutes he instantly forgets. Because
the swallow is intention in a fluid state it is
impossible for it to “miss.” On the other
hand a swallow’s evening has been usefully compared
to a book comprised entirely of errata slips.
He wings it.
KESTRELS
The name “Sparrow hawk” is unfair to this handsome and beneficial little falcon.
– The Birds of Canada
1.
unfurl from the hydro wire, beat
con brio out across the field and
hover, marshalling the moment, these
gestures of our slender hostess,
ushering her guests into the dining room
2.
sprung rhythm and
surprises, enharmonic change directions simply
step outside and let the earth turn
underneath, trapdoors, new lungs, missing bits
of time, plump familiar pods go
pop in your mind you learn not
pity for that paraplegic bird, the heart
3.
to watch by the roadside singing killy killy killy,
plumaged like a tasteful parrot,
to have a repertoire of moves so clean their edge is
the frontier of nothing
to be sudden to send
postcards of distance which arrive in nicks of time
to open letters with a knife
WHITE PINE
In our dance philosophy we say: Think before you move.
– The Techniques of Isadora Duncan
Watch me.
This is how I walk
softly and carry a sharp stick
lightly as a paintbrush. This is how I
mill the slow
momentum of the earth how I
turn its turning to my
reaching how I
swirl up to a point
releasing silent pings among the birdsongs.
And this is how I wear my maidenhair
to stroll the slope, how I invite
your eye to know the smoothness of my limbs’
articulations, elbows, armpits
backs of knees
lovelier than which I think that you will never see.
TO SING AND FEED
among the spruce: Bach
would put this evening on the cello
and chew it.
You would feel the long strokes
bite and sweep, everything
curve away, arching back
against the bow.
You would know the end before the end
would understand the Red-winged blackbirds calling
konkeree konkeree the sexual
buzz the silver
falling whistle hanging from the top spines of the spruce
like tinsel.
You would dwell in imminence.
You would arrive home empty
covered with burrs
ready
MOURNING DOVES
In the dim unwritten folklore of the heart
they are the soft grey sisters
muting the cries of their brother, the Great Horned Owl, to
woe
woe
woe for every victim, calling,
recalling the Passenger Pigeons who were much as they
but rosy-breasted, brighter-eyed, amoureuse, and bigger.
AUGUST
Everything is full but she
keeps pumping on the inside
chintzing up the outside till her month becomes
a regular rococo whorehouse in an expanding economy.
Back and forth salaam salaam the sprinklers
graze and pray on plush
carpets of grass, beer becomes sweat, the heavy
air surrounds, mothers us to immobility, the mind
melts, the elements
slump, four fat uncles in their lawn chairs, while the flesh
well the flesh just ambles into town to get drunk
with the ball players.
We knew this ripeness and we knew
her smiling, solitary
reaper.
The shiver slid
beneath the sunburn with the fatal
rightness of a shift to minor key:
she loved him, she dressed up in her gypsy best,
she left.
LISTEN AT THE EDGE
At the edge of firelight
where the earth is cradled in soft
black gloves filled with unknown hands, where
every word is shadowed by its animal, our ears
are empty auditoria for
scritch scritch scritch rr-ronk the
shh uh shh of greater
anonymities the little
brouhahas that won’t lie still for type
and die
applauseless,
humus to our talking. Listen
while they peck like enzymes, eat
the information from our voices, scritch
and whip-poor-will and peent, o