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.
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