[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

running on nothing but the cold air
of Saskatchewan, its dome car
empty as the mind of Buddha.
Window turns to mirror,
a black lake faintly smoked by blowing snow.
20 / Field Marks
In it we can see our ghosts, transparent
creatures of the dark, bravely reading their
reversed editions of the Calgary Herald,
riding the freezing wind like gulls.
The Poetry of Don McKay / 21
Buckling
Even the windhover makes mistakes
some slight
miscalculation and he s prey
to ordinary cats, trailing a slate blue wounded wing
beside the porch. What sort of shrug
suffices? How can we call up Hopkins and
reverse the charges shouting Jesus Christ so
this is fury the whole sky
compressed to microdot his eye
already fading, no wait as you photograph re
photograph the bird
blooms through your daughter s hand and every
shot will be his absence living in her
finger pen or paintbrush like an empty river, don t
die now: if only he would
sink his hooked beak in your tongue instead
you feed him stale coke and the
quick lift of caffeine revives him briefly
sliding a talon through the sweet flesh of your fist
22 / Field Marks
Some Functions of a Leaf
To whisper. To applaud the wind
and hide the Hermit thrush.
To catch the light
and work the humble spell of photosynthesis
(excuse me sir, if I might have one word)
by which it s changed to wood.
To wait
willing to feed
and be food.
To die with style:
as the tree retreats inside itself,
shutting off the valves at its
extremities
to starve in technicolour, then
having served two hours in a children s leaf pile, slowly
stir its vitamins into the earth.
To be the artist of mortality.
The Poetry of Don McKay / 23
How to Imagine an Albatross
(assisted by the report of a CIA observer near Christmas Island)
To imagine an albatross
a mind must widen to the breadth of the Pacific Ocean
dissolve its edges to admit a twelve foot wingspan soaring
silently across the soft enormous heave as the planet
breathes into another dawn.
This might be
dream without content or the opening of a film
in which the credits never run no speck appears
on the horizon fattening to Randolph Scott on horseback
or the lost
brown mole below your shoulder blade, the albatross
is so much of the scene he drinks the ocean never needs
to beat the air into supporting him but
thoughtlessly as an idea, as a phrase-mark holding notes
in sympathy, arcs above the water.
And to imagine an albatross
we must plan to release the rage
which holds this pencil in itself, to prod things
until their atoms shift, rebel against their thingness, chairs
run into walls, stones
pour like a mob from their solidity.
A warm-up exercise:
once
in London, Ontario, a backhoe accidentally
took out a regulator on the gas-line, so the pressure
of the system
rushed the neighbourhood. Stoves
turned into dragons and expressed
their secret passions all along the ordinary street
the houses bloomed fiercely as the peonies in their front
yards.
24 / Field Marks
Meanwhile the albatross, thoughtlessly
as an idea, as a phrase-mark holding notes
in sympathy, arcs into a day
that will escape the dull routine of dayness and achieve
crescendo.
Placing ourselves safely
at a distance we observe
how the sky burns off its blueness to unveil
the gaze of outer space, which even here
has turned the air psychotic. The birds
start smoking, then,
as though Van Gogh were painting them, turn
cartwheels in the air, catch fire
and fall into the ocean.
What saves us now from heat and light
what keeps us now from biting off our tongues
what stops blood boiling through the heart blocks
recognition of this burning curve
slicing like a scythe through the mind
is what hereafter will protect us
from the earth.
The Poetry of Don McKay / 25
from Black Spruce
Along the shoreline, shelves, soft
curves as the rock
erotically enters water. Shoulder
knuckle skull hip vertebreast combined and
recombined: three
hundred million years before the animals
appeared in the Triassic
they were dreamt of in Precambrian
volcanoes. Feel the muscle
slide over bone as you crouch
beside a Harebell, think of rootlets
reaching into rock, licking its slow
fury into food,
hoisting this small blue flag.
26 / Field Marks
Another Theory of Dusk
What is there to say
when the sky pours in the window
and the ground begins to eat its figures?
We sit like dummies in our kitchen, deaf
among enormous crumplings of light.
Small wonder each thing looms
crowding its edge.
In silent movies everyone overacts a little.
It would be nice to breathe the air inside the cello.
That would satisfy one
thirst of the voice. As it is
only your ribcage speaks for me now,
a wicker basket full of sorrow and wish, so tough
so finely tuned we have often
reinvented the canoe
and paddled off.
It would be nice to write the field guide for those riverbanks,
to speak without names of the fugitive
nocturnal creatures that live and die in our lives.
The Poetry of Don McKay / 27
Meditation on a Geode
To find one, even among souvenirs of Banff from acrylic to
zinc, is to realize that rock, ordinary limestone, composes in [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]