[Image: “Pass Me That Wrench,” by June Yarham; found on Flickr, of course, and used here under a Creative Commons license. (Thank you!)]
From whiskey river (italicized lines):
Sometimes a Voice (1)
Sometimes a voice—have you heard this?—
wants not to be voice any longer, wants something
whispering between the words, some
rumour of its former life. Sometimes, even
in the midst of making sense or conversation, it will
hearken back to breath, or even farther,
to the wind, and recognize itself
as troubled air, a flight path still
looking for its bird.
I’m thinking of us up there
shingling the boathouse roof. That job is all
off balance—squat, hammer, body skewed
against the incline, heft the bundle,
daub the tar, squat. Talking,
as we have always talked, about not living
past the age of thirty with its
labyrinthine perils: getting hooked,
steady job, kids, business suit. Fuck that. The roof
sloped upward like a take-off ramp
waiting for Evel Knievel, pointing into open sky. Beyond it
twenty feet or so of concrete wharf before
the blue-black water of the lake. Danny said
that he could make it, easy. We said
never. He said case of beer, put up
or shut up. We said
asshole. Frank said first he should go get our beer
because he wasn’t going to get it paralysed or dead.
Everybody got up, taking this excuse
to stretch and smoke and pace the roof
from eaves to peak, discussing gravity
and Steve McQueen, who never used a stunt man, Danny’s
life expectancy, and whether that should be a case
of Export or O’Keefe’s. We knew what this was—
ongoing argument to fray
the tedium of work akin to filter vs. plain,
stick shift vs. automatic, condom vs.
pulling out in time. We flicked our butts toward the lake
and got back to the job. And then, amid the squat,
hammer, heft, no one saw him go. Suddenly he
wasn’t there, just his boots
with his hammer stuck inside one like a heavy-headed
flower. Back then it was bizarre that,
after all that banter, he should be so silent,
so inward with it just to
run off into sky. Later I thought,
cool. Still later I think it makes sense his voice should
sink back into breath and breath
devote itself to taking in whatever air
might have to say on that short flight between the roof
and the rest of his natural life.
(Don McKay [source])
…and:
4. Minor Miracles
Taking the empty air
Deep in our lungs,
Warming it there,Extracting from it
What our blood needs,Then breathing it back
Out as sound
We’ve added meaning to.
(Gregory Orr [source])
Not from whiskey river:
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
satisfaction of the blues. It huddles in the lungs
and won’t come out. Not 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 the raven 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.
(Don McKay [source])
….and:
Michel de Montaigne ascribed animals’ silence to man’s own wilful arrogance. The French essayist argued that animals could speak, that they were in possession of rich consciousness, but that man wouldn’t condescend to listen. ‘It is through the vanity of the same imagination that [man] equates himself with God,’ Montaigne wrote, ‘that he attributes divine attributes for himself, picks himself out and separates himself from the crowd of other creatures.’ Montaigne asked: ‘When I play with my cat, who knows if she is making more of a pastime of me than I of her?’
Montaigne’s question is as playful as his cat. Apology [for Raymond Sebond] is not meant to answer the age-old question, but rather to provoke; to tap into an unending inquiry about the reasoning of animals. Perhaps, Montaigne implies, we simply misunderstand the foreign language of animals, and the ignorance is not theirs, but ours…
No matter how different, each genre of the talking animal exists on a continuum of the same fantasy. It is a reflection of a series of particular human desires, formed by historical needs and written onto the talking animal. Speaking animals provide us with the potential of an entirely different world — a world that is reminiscent of our own, even familiar, and yet still uncanny enough to maintain the fantasy. As the feminist scholar Donna Haraway wrote in 1978: ‘We polish an animal mirror to look for ourselves.’
But perhaps that mirror is more suited for a funhouse.
(Stassa Edwards [source])
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