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of the sternum with the extra keel it has evolved to
anchor all that effort, of the dark wind
and the white curl on the waves below, the slow dawn
and the thickening shoreline.
I wanted
very much to stroke it, and recalling
several terrors of my brief
and trivial existence, didn t.
44 / Field Marks
Luna Moth Meditation
How foolish to think death s pale flag
would be rectangular and stark, rather than this
scrap of wedding dress symmetrically ripped
and sent back, cruelly,
to be his deaf and nearly mouthless
messenger. As it unfolds gorgeous, appalling
I can feel my mind fill up
with its own weight, as though
suffering unexpected snowfall.
Think of a Eurydice who makes it
all the way, following an Orpheus
with more self-discipline,
and probably less talent, just to find herself
forbidden that huge
other eros:
how she craves the darkness and her legs
drink down into dirt. And that moment
in the sickroom when the dead one s been removed
and the Kleenex in the waste can
starts to metamorphose, tissue
taking wing, wing
taking the very drape and slope of grief
and struggling out the door.
The Poetry of Don McKay / 45
Hush Factor
Rogue translation. Out of lullaby and slow
cathedral air to wrench this barely
thickened sibilance and make it mean
the sudden death of sound: hush.
So more
than silent is the flight of owls
the slightest rustle gives itself away,
conspires to perish.
The owls have struck a deal with drag, their wide wings
fringed like petticoats, the underneath
covered by a sort of nap as though
wearing frillies on the outside.
They come as a quilt,
as the softness inside touch that
whispers in your skin.
The neighbourhoods they flow through
turn into the underworld unfolding behind Orpheus as,
endlessly, he climbs toward us the deep call
of its gravity, the frail memory of day,
the vertigo which is the cocktail of the two together
mixing in his mind: hush.
The Barred Owl swept
out of our neighbour s tree and passed
just above our heads before it vanished
into the yard across the street. And awe rose,
from what depth we could not say, and left the dusk
seduced. We turned to walk back home. What cats,
we wondered, were just then being let out,
lovingly, into the night?
46 / Field Marks
Sometimes a Voice (2)
Sometimes a voice have you heard this?
wants not to be voice any longer and this longing
is the worst of longings. Nothing
assuages. Not the curry-comb of conversation,
not the dog-eared broken
satisfactions of the blues. It huddles in the lungs
and won t come out. Nor for the Mendelssohn Choir
constructing habitable spaces in the air, not for Yeats
intoning Song of the Old Mother to an ancient
microphone. It curls up in its cave
and will not stir. Not for the gentle quack
of saxophone, not for raven s far-calling
croak. Not for oh the lift of poetry, or ah
the lover s sigh, or um the phrase s lost
left shoe. It tucks its nose beneath its brush
and won t. If her whisper tries
to pollinate your name, if a stranger yells
hey kid, va t en chez toi to set another music
going in your head it simply
enters deafness. Nothing
assuages. Maybe it is singing
high in the cirque, burnishing itself
against the rockwall, maybe it is
clicking in the stones turned by the waves like faceless
dice. Have you heard this? in the hush
of invisible feathers as they urge the dark,
stroking it toward articulation? Or the moment
when you know it s over and the nothing which you
have to say is falling all around you, lavishly,
pouring its heart out.
The Poetry of Don McKay / 47
Astonished
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 æon.
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.
48 / Field Marks
Afterword
The Shell of the Tortoise
To write about my own writing: this could be perilous. Just contemplating it
from a distance, I can feel the threat of conjecture stiffening toward rhetoric,
the shadow of a quasi-official practice falling across my loose collection of
habits and tricks. So what I need to do first is to invoke a protective presence,
a companion who can be depended upon to prevent seriousness from deviat-
ing into solemnity, who will cast a wry destabilizing smile on any reflections
that show signs of hardening into plaques. I need to ask Hermes to keep an
eye on things.
The lyre the poet s instrument belongs first to Apollo, and then to
Orpheus. But the god who invents it, over and over, is Hermes. Trickster,
messenger of the gods, cattle rustler, psychopomp, Hermes is the invaluable
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