Don McKay

That rising curve, the fine line

between craft and magic where we

travel uphill without effort, where anticipation,

slipping into eros,

                   summons the skin. When you

say “you” with that inflection something stirs

inside the word, echo

infected with laugh. One night O., gazing at the moon

as usual, encountered K. as he was trying to outwalk

bureaucracy. Yes, they said, let’s. If it is

possible to translate poetry, then,

what isn’t?

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 a 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 I’ll

do the crying for you, licking the schists

into flat skippable discs. That uninhabit”ed laughter

sluicing the methodically shorn valley.

He went there to finger the strike/slip

fissure between rock and stone between Vivaldi’s

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.

Irresistible, on this atmospheric planet, where

there’s a blue to carry the heart home and a blue

for virgins and a blue to call

the spider from the drain.

Nobody argues with its

shameless imitation of love, diving

simultaneously into the eye and out of sight: sea,

sky, the absence of convulsions and flags,

our own errata winking at us out of depths or heights.

Knowing that one day we will fall to black

or fade to grey, and blue

has been both places and includes them

as a saxophone includes its drastic

possibilities. It’s with us.

We’ve been gone before.

Before it can stop itself, the mind

has leapt up inferences, crag to crag,

the obvious arpeggio. Where there is a doorbell

there must be a door – a door

meant to be opened from inside.

Door means house means – wait a second –

but already it is standing on a threshold previously

known to be thin air, gawking. The Black Spruce

point to it: clarity,

melting into ordinary morning, true

north. Where the sky is just a name,

a way to pitch a little tent in space and sleep

for five unnumbered seconds.

The inverse of language is like a laughter that seeks to destroy language, a laughter infinitely reverberated.

                              – EMMANUEL LEVINAS

The laugh that ate the snake and

runs through the city dressed in a sneeze, the mischief

done in these sly

passages of time, when the tongue is

severed from the voice and

fed to the weather, when the running

patter of catbirds simply

swallows the agenda, nothing to be held back,

nothing rescued in a catch-phrase or figure, your

house is on fire

and your children are gone.

When evenings pass as unseen

immaculate ships, and folk –

everyone is suddenly folk – rush to their porches

and lift their faces to this

effervescence of air,

wishing.

                Wishing what?

Just wishing.