McKay - Paradoxides: poems

POETRY
Strike/Slip (2006)
Camber: Selected Poems 19832000 (2004)
Another Gravity (2000)
Apparatus (1997)
Night Field (1991)
Sanding Down This Rocking Chair on a Windy Night (1987)
Birding, or Desire (1983)
Lightning Ball Bait (1980)
Lependu (1978)
Long Sault (1975)
Air Occupies Space (1973) ESSAYS
The Shell of the Tortoise (2011)
The Muskwa Assemblage (2009)
Deactivated West 100 (2005)
Vis Vis: Field Notes on Poetry & Wilderness (2002) Copyright 2012 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. Published simultaneously in the United States of America by McClelland & Stewart Ltd.,
P.O. Box 1030, Plattsburgh, New York, 12901 L IBRARY AND A RCHIVES C ANADA C ATALOGUING IN P UBLICATION McKay, Don, 1942
Paradoxides / Don McKay. Poems. Title. Title.

PS8575.K28P37 2012 C811.54 C2011-904425-0 Library of Congress Control Number: 2011931127 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 Corporations 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.
75 Sherbourne Street
Toronto, Ontario
M5A 2P9
www.mcclelland.com v3.1 For Marlene

This title contains long lines of poetry. The line of characters below indicates approximately the longest line in the text: with manic homebound Newfoundland-and-Labradorians, To most accurately reproduce the layout of the text on the printed page, you may choose to decrease the size of the text on your viewer and/or change the orientation of your screen until the above line of characters fits on a single line. This may not be possible on all e-reading devices. Viewing this title at a higher than optimal text size or on a screen too small to accommodate the longest lines in the text will alter the reading experience and may cause single lines of some poems to display as multiple lines of text.

If this occurs, the turn of the line will be marked with a shallow indent.

Play it con brio, a muscular iamb, a frisbee sizzling as if into no mans land, an emptiness unfurling fast and fernlike. Last winter, from a cliff along the coast, I saw a Milky Way strewn lavishly across the cove, twinkling in the chop. It was cold, and so some moments before my stiff fingers unburied the binoculars and found it to be eiders. In their black skippers caps they scudded the waves, colds own creatures, their white chests flashing in the slant sun, until, as at a signal, with a move part gulp, part slurp, each, one after the other, dove, like this: as if, as if, as if that surface were the border suddenly porous between yes and no, so and not so. Something of winter, something of winter again, something of that famous mortal reed making an oboe of the throat.

As though the soul not so much in pain as under pressure yelped. Angst, angst, bite-sized bits of loneliness sent back to the heartless skies they fell from, giving grief its rightful place among the elements. So what if they waddle, shit gooseshit on the grass all summer then neglect to migrate? Were the geese to quit their existential yammer, talk would also cease, each would-be dialogue collapse into its own hole. Where there was ivy, ice. Ice where there was moss.

In the understory, sotto voce, crypto-birds rehearse. In the understory, sotto voce, crypto-birds rehearse.

Is that you, Junco, setting your Hopkins-self aside to sip-sip-sip so generically? That you, Varied Thrush, clearing your throat ad nauseum, uncertain as the rain that quits, dithers, threatens, finally compromises on the drizzle into which your indecipherable ciphers fit like inter office memoranda? Over the dun duff of the forest floor one alder leaf thinned by winter to its skeleton hangs like a glyph. Foliose lichens urge their hypergreens. One day soon so goes the tale Juncos voice will quicken into trill, its quick lusts gargling. Varied Thrush will thrust its whistle-hum frankly into the mix, and that last leaf like an icon suddenly relaxing to clich uncling. And then by the Jesus well be on our way.

It eschews the ear, with its toolshed, its lab, its Centre for Advanced Studies in Hermeneutics and Gossip, to boom exactly in my thorax, rattling the bones and waking the baby.

Garroo: the os are caves of lunar gravity, the rolled r recalls the ratchet of life and death. Why am I standing on this frigid porch in my pyjamas, peering into the mist that rises in little spirals from the pond? Where they call from the blue has nearly thinned to no-colour-clear. Where they call from hominids havent yet happened. Garroo: who can bear those star-river distances? Im so lonesome I could die happy.

The very word is, if you ask me, like a horn fog, French, krumm, coranglais, or car depending on the timbre and accent of its native loss. Its never like the bell that tolled Keats back to life the night he nearly ODed on The Nightingale.

Anyway, what odds? It tolls for him but honks for me, a closed nasal existential echo, not quite recovered from that nasty cold. Forlorn: the bare unfaeried self re-pots us in our deaths as into humus. Not lonely, twanging of teen angst and Nashville. Not solitary, with its would-be-Thomas-Merton air of being the best graduate student He has supervised in eras. Forlorn: it is 2:45 a.m. again.

Noises, some like itch, some like scratch, surround the cabin. One rises in a hiss (snake? bird? cat?) over and over until Im up, irascible, up and out, dammit, with the flashlight stumbling toward the source. As though whatever it is started to say curse then switched to kiss, then ship. The flashlight poking tunnels into the dark, selecting arty angles through the foliage, and finds them there, huddled on a branch, two grey lumps, staring down the beam like fluffy wide-eyed monks. Owlets, Im guessing barred, out of the nest but not yet fledged, still begging for food from the ruthless mother, who is elsewhere. Darkling, I listen, switching off the spot.

The hiss of hunger, separation, and to insert a personal note sleeplessness. Ksship: how to translate that? Forlorn, of course, the very word.

If thats the word: the songs already gone before its uttered so the ear is left full of its emptiness, bereft. It seems the loon opens its throat to some old elemental wind, it seems that time has finally found a syrinx and for a moment lets itself be voice. What perilous music! Surely, like Odysseus, we ought to stop our ears against this feral ultrasound with its dreadful diagnostic reverb? But no, we would rather be stricken, rather suspect that the spirit also is a migratory species, that it is right now flying to Star River as the ancients called the Milky Way that in fact it is already there, yodelling for no one and ignoring us, the collectors, with our heads full of closets, our hearts full of ovens, and our sad feet.