In Wind Again, Wondering
Today’s wind humbles mind, breathes it, trailing
fragments of blue sky, elmming like crazy.
Stan’s ball cap blow offs, his book blows open.
He places his bag on top of the book,
it blows off. As he bends to reach his bag
the table gives way. Fighting for balance
but further from it all the time, Stan spills
down the riverbank out of anyone’s
sight but the river’s about twenty, ten,
five, two feet away where Stan comes to rest
against an old piling, one of fifteen
or so, he notes, dry, pinned against the bank,
ripples reflecting up his body, air
aswoop in swallows.
He could die right here,
scattered in one piece. He could watch himself
re-compose, could lie like a margin, blown
from his own left edge, could blend with the hard
stuff and soften. He could believe in wind,
accept the logic of its one long word
The God-damned Birds of Saskatchewan
The birds got so bad Stan would head inside
to drown them out with Occupational
Health and Safety DVDs. Otherwise,
they owned him. First thing in the morning—dreams
like precious fruit still ripening the hour
before sunrise—one bird would wake Stan up
with its mournful coo-ooooooh, coo-ooooooh. Stan hired
neighbour kids to pelt Mr. Mourning Dove
with lengths of rebar, stones and worthless coins.
Stan would be sitting in his breakfast nook.
Slice of bread with peanut butter, toasted.
Milk, banana, orange, pot of tea.
He’d open a few windows into sweet
morning light. Two seconds later krrrrrr-rrapp,
krrrrrr-rrapp and Stan begins to feel trrrrrrapped.
He goes for a walk. If he can’t escape
the so-called songs, he might as well write them
down, way down, in his book. The “songs” might look
a hell of a lot better than they sound.
He’d never spent such a long afternoon.
He must have ignored forty or fifty
“songbirds” yakking away, one more bitter
than the next. Not content with making noise,
they flew about—low over the river,
from ground to nearest tree, in ragged packs
or, if lucky, in fierce, vole-hunting glides
far above the sound of other birds. Page
after page of Stan’s notebook filled
with hiccups, gurgles, chatters, twitters, chips,
and oodle-oodles. Stan had heard enough.
In the best of all worlds, Stan thought, the end
of a bird book means the end of all birds.
Then the cottonwoods could blow, the sky roll,
the river remember, all of it clear
as May. But in the world Stan occupies,
he has two choices. One, put music on,
Schubert lieder, see if that doesn’t help.
The other way out is to go further
inside, downstairs, beneath the thickest beams
next to the furnace, the deepest corner
of the darkest house, where a man can be
alone, where a man can imagine birds
a man can’t hear.
Stan Gets Twice as Simple (As Before)
Where Stan was, in the bare hills north of town,
lots wasn’t. Seated, facing south against
the Whitemud valley with his legs spread out,
Stan imagined coulee. Like any groove
in Stan’s own body, the coulee began
with slight creasing of an even field.
The crease defined a pair of rounded banks,
winding deeper to thick woods and, lower,
the open field again. Today he’d walked
across the top of several such events.
In dreams Stan grew the bright colours that night—
wildflowers, rock-coats. He witnessed fissures
and decay, wind-assaults, familiar rubs
of sage. There was no stumbling in Stan’s dreams,
no picking up of sticks, no startling deer.
Waking up was easy, just a gentle
lift, but labourious, because it was
so gradual. In fact, as Stan noted,
waking is to dreaming as one coulee
is to the next. You just keep following.
Wednesday Morning
What Stan knows of Martes americana,
the pine marten, he writes in just one line
I see one right now. The rest he looks up,
claiming the marten’s project as his own:
Climb or take your prey along the ground. Swim,
if you must, tunnel under snow, den up
in a storm. Lope, wear a dark-brown body,
much-prized. Prefer old-growth coniferous.
Stay curious, hunt the open for voles,
hare, shrew, grouse, other ancient forest life,
even a logger’s lunch.
Stan feels for
the marten’s loss of range, its steep decline
in abundance, its solitary hours.
Larger mammals and hawks and owls all prey
on marten but Stan himself is its worst
enemy, he reads, as if that frozen
peach he pitched up the slope the other day
somehow threatens ravine-land. But look, now
his marten has followed the deadfall out
of sight. So long, brother, Stan says, loping
back inside.
Banner Image by Gerald Hill
