Midnight Dip, by Don McKay

Howard Shore - The Fellowship
from the soundtrack to The Lord of the Rings Trilogy

Whose dumb idea was this
anyhow?    Silently
the chill air purges content and establishes
its interrogative. This is going to be
more dangerous than we supposed, wrapped
in our living room of beer and friendly conversation.
Moonlight
sheds itself along the path, madly
abandoned underwear.
What essence awaits us in the lake,
that lived inside our talk as easily
as bath and wash, now
sharpening to something like the afterlife of music moving in an
arc beyond the reaches of its melody?



from Camber: Selected Poems (McClelland & Stewart, 2004)

Luna moth meditation, by Don McKay

Frédéric Chopin - Nocturne no. 19, Op 72 no. 1, with Sviatoslav Richter

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.



from Another Gravity, McClelland & Stewart (2000)