McKay - Sanding Down This Rocking Chair on a Windy Night

ALSO BY DON McKAY
Air Occupies Space 1973 Long Sault 1975 Lependu 1978 Lightning Ball Bait 1980 Birding, or desire 1983 Copyright 1987 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 consent of the publisher, is an infringement of the copyright law. The Canadian Publishers
McClelland & Stewart Ltd.
75 Sherbourne Street,
Toronto, Ontario
M5A 2P9 Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data McKay, Don, 1942
Sanding down this rocking chair on a windy night Poems.
ISBN 0-7710-5542-0
eBook ISBN: 978-1-55199-668-4 I. Title. PS8575.K28S36 1987 C811.54 C87-093296-9 PR9199.3.M323S36 1987 The publisher makes grateful acknowledgment to the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for their assistance. v3.1 This title contains long lines of poetry.

The line of characters below indicates approximately the longest line in the text: beautiful downtown London Ont., city of malls, Cardinal capital 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. This book is for Rob
and in memory of Margaret Maxwell, Henry Russell, and Luke.Well, said Chuang Tzu, above ground I shall be eaten by crows and kites, below it by ants and worms. In either case I shall be eaten.

Why are you so partial to birds?

This is a secret. The barn across the road grows dark and inward sending thin gleams through its chinks like hints. The dog sniffs, barks at nothing dissolves into a tawny pool on the porch. Absent mindedness finds its medium. The last tractor dies chortling. There are birds no one has ever seen uncaged in any book unguessed by metaphor chirping from the uncombed fringes of the lawn.

Flowers begin inhaling through their roots exhaling darkness. Fields are seduced outward to their edges where raccoons whet their wits against us.

Dancing white redundancies, a flock of ifs: we switch to low beam to avoid hypnosis. If we could see them under a microscope Mrs. McLatchie said, each would be a universe unlike unique and clear as she herself declaring Canadas Food Rules or taping paper snowflakes to the window: bits of lace, like her cuffs and handkerchiefs fixed between us and the scruffy schoolyard. Now, as the borders of the highway disappear we think of Einstein.

Gaga futures turn our eyes into kaleidoscopes, our car into the ditch where we grow closer to our native tropicality, watch shredded lire blending to a blanket of lost hopes. Value everywhere, empty. A wealth of natural resources. Fifteen two fifteen four fifteen six in a paper on re integrating us Trans-Canada strandees an eminent psychologist observes our slow return to speech. Unlike the Inuit we know fewer and fewer words for you-know-what until s-n-o-w itself eludes us. Unable to see print we focus in the depths of page and a triple run is fifteen stranded like the poet who is stranded in another of the four dozen (give or take a few) snow poems he will have written by the time the drifts have reached his mouth and filled it with his epitaph: some line that idles into lace holds nothing in its holes like quick cold eyes melts

Too much juice and too much joy and too much tooralooraloorum in the fat black current too full of itself, its excess over flowing into ecstasy its muscles flexing over muscles bunching up in haystacks of its own wild oats then, suddenly sobbing, eddies back against the flow.

Even in passages smooth as blended scotch that deep gleam winks The waterfalls recite all night, urgent, dithyrambic, not quite making sense but living in us as another tongue, a language based on laughter. Who understands this? No one in his right mind. No one who resists, who rides his delicate shell safely through its craziness. If it should take us tipsy and broadside well be laughing all the way to the bank of Lake Superior. At the edge of the small falls where a fresh arm in an arc of foam crosses its slick wide hip these words dance their dream of perfect bodies, hopeless, stumbling into bump and grind. Algoma, June 1983

Colds wry overdrive surprising bone by speaking Bone ossified Latin of last things. Algoma, June 1983 Colds wry overdrive surprising bone by speaking Bone ossified Latin of last things.

Kric Krac Kroc whisper the oracular French Rice Krispies, emptiness disguised as food. Ice cubes clink in your glass. Clouds crystallize and break, regather on the ground and lock. You cant hide in the flesh forever. Glaciers write with rock on rock.

Underneath their bark the willows have begun to blush.

Hard to say this awkwardly enough. Fretted embarrassed by chill wind. Or someone not quite talking in her sleep, likely dreaming richer music into the broken twitter of the Horned larks pecking by the ditch. Third ears are tuning up but the sky, bleak and hungry as an empty blackboard, is about to crack again. Later on well find them wearing wedding dresses looking lonely looking downright foolish.

Such a long way from the heart to the extremities we die back daily like the plants, each to his office autistic as our faithful convalescent cars.

We eat the wings of large flightless birds. We wash our socks in the sink. Each thing in itself. This is the secret life of light: a tiny room with no dimensions but the long ache of baroque: evening is bleeding inward from the bowls edge, blue black with the heavy hint of snow: a tears interior. No one is home at last.

Each smooth slim limb bursting with leaf as a child with a secret underneath my fingers that soft feline power springing into being (the most muscular of existentialists) while the innocent unruly ones are skinny dipping in the blood, inventing new dives, bombs away the drunken swan the absent minded professor carefully barbering the saplings, thinking back connection to the days of her internment, days when she rode the subway like the n in Wednesday, back and forth and back the underground embraced her in its great grey hug, thinking how each maple must recall that static agony, convert its energy to leaf as carefully I snip another fresh unnecessary stem suckering the silver maples grows along the fringe of industry and corn. Each smooth slim limb bursting with leaf as a child with a secret underneath my fingers that soft feline power springing into being (the most muscular of existentialists) while the innocent unruly ones are skinny dipping in the blood, inventing new dives, bombs away the drunken swan the absent minded professor carefully barbering the saplings, thinking back connection to the days of her internment, days when she rode the subway like the n in Wednesday, back and forth and back the underground embraced her in its great grey hug, thinking how each maple must recall that static agony, convert its energy to leaf as carefully I snip another fresh unnecessary stem suckering the silver maples