Mckay - Strike/Slip

POETRY
Air Occupies Space 1973
Long Sault 1975
Lependu 1978
Lightning Ball Bait 1980
Birding, or desire 1983
Sanding Down This Rocking Chair on a Windy Night 1987
Night Field 1991
Apparatus 1997
Another Gravity 2000
Camber: Selected Poems 1983-2000 2004
Strike/Slip 2006 ESSAYS
Visvis: Fieldnotes on Poetry and Wilderness 2001
Deactivated West 100 2005 Copyright 2006 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. LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION McKay, Don, 1942
Strike/slip / Don McKay. eISBN: 978-1-55199-406-2 I. Title. PS 8575.

K 28 S 87 2006 C 811.54 C 2005-906040-9 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

This title contains long lines of poetry. The line of characters below indicates approximately the longest line in the text: having heard their keels bone-crunch on the beach, the terrible/ 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.

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astounded, astonied, astunned, stopped short and turned toward stone, the moment filling with its slow stratified time. Standing there, your face cratered by its gawk, you might be the symbol signifying eon. What are you, empty or pregnant? Somewhere sediments accumulate on seabeds, seabeds rear up into mountains, ammonites fossilize into gems. Are you thinking or being thought? Cities as sand dunes, epics as e-mail. Astonished you are famous and anonymous, the border washed out by so soft a thing as weather.

Someone inside you steps from the forest and across the beach toward the nameless all-dissolving ocean.

your hearts tongue seized mid-syllable, caught by the lava flow you fled. Fixed, you stiffen in the arms of wonders dark undomesticated sister. Cant you name her and escape? You are the statue that has lost the entrance into art, wild and incompetent, you have no house. Who are you? You are the crystal that picks up its many deaths. He went there to have it exact. He went there to have it exact.

The broken prose of the bush roads. The piles of half-burnt slash. Stumps high on the valley wall like sconces on a medieval ruin. To have it tangible. To carry it as load rather than as mood or mist. To heft it earth measure, rock measure and feel its raw drag without phrase for the voice or handle for the hand.

He went there to hear the rapids curl around the big basaltic boulders saying husserl husserl, saying Ill do the crying for you, licking the schists into flat skippable discs. That uninhabited laughter sluicing the methodically shorn valley. He went there to finger the strike/slip fissure between rock and stone between Vivaldis waterfall and the wavering note a varied thrush sets on a shelf of air. Recognizing the sweet perils rushing in the creek crawling through the rock. He knew he should not trust such pauseless syntax. That he should just say no.

But he went there just the same.

Ancient and young, oldest bone of the planet that was just last week laid bare by the blunt sculpting of the ice: it seemed a land designed to summon mammals haunched and shouldered, socketed. Each lake we entered was a lens, curious and cold that brought us into focus. Would I go back to that time, that chaste and dangerous embrace? Not unless I was allowed, as carry-on, some sediment that has since accumulated, something to impede the passage of those days that ran through us like celluloid. Excerpts from the book of loss. Tendonitis.

Second thoughts. Field guides. Did we even notice that the red pine sprang directly from the rock and swayed in wind like gospel choirs? Not us. We were muscle loving muscle, drank straight from the rivers ran the rapids threw our axes at the trees rode the back of every moose we caught mid-crossing put our campfires out by pissing on the flames. We could tell you how those fuck-ups in Deliverance fucked up: (1) stupid tin canoe (2) couldnt do the J-stroke (3) wore life jackets (4) didnt have the wit to be immortal and ephemeral as we were. Sometimes, in Tom Thomsons paintings you can see vestigial human figures, brushstrokes among brushstrokes.

Would I go back to that time, those lakes? Not without my oft-repeated dream of diving for the body possibly my own, possibly the lost anonymous companions and surfacing to gulp in air (the granite ridges watching, the clouds above them vacant and declarative) and plunging once again into transparent unintelligible depths.

Who is so heavy with the past as you, Monsieur Basalt? Not the planets most muscular depressive, not the twentieth century. How many fingerholds have failed, been blown or washed away, unworthy of your dignified avoirdupois, your strict hexagonal heart? I have arrived to show you, first the interrogative mood, then secrets of the niche, then Italian. Listen, slow one, let me be your fool, let me sit on your front porch in my underwear and tell you risqu stories about death. Together we will mix our dust and luck and turn ourself into the archipelago of nooks. You wake, it wants you, your room is fleuve.

No use hiding underneath the covers, no use clinging to the lamp. It bears away your diary, your mystery, your dresser bobs off like a basket of reeds. There goes the lamp you might have clung to, trailing its muskrat tail, there goes the laundry to its long last rinse. The arms of your octopus, formerly alarm clock, clutch, grabbing like a teenage lover like a two-year-old it wants you it wont wait for you to die to lick the letters from your name. Your old heart, driven by its pell-mell bloodstream, spins, legs on a runaway bike, you wake, your room is fleuve, youre flotsam, youre also-ran, youre all the riff-raff Noah had no room for, uncountable Canada geese and not-quite-standard moose, youre everyone who ever missed the playoffs, it wants you, you have to go, already you can feel youre somewhere else, deposited, youre washed up in some other life as insubstantial as a stone. Pond. Pond.