Sometimes a Voice (by Don McKay)
Sometimes a Voice (by Don McKay)
Original Text
Don McKay, Another Gravity (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2000).
This
poem
is reproduced on the Griffin Prize Web Site
(from a volume on the 2001 Canadian Shortlist).
1Sometimes a voice--have you heard this?--
2wants not to be voice any longer, wants something
3whispering between the words, some
4rumour of its former life. Sometimes, even
5in the midst of making sense or conversation, it will
6hearken back to breath, or even farther,
7to the wind, and recognize itself
8as troubled air, a flight path still
9looking for its bird.
10 I’m thinking of us up there
11shingling the boathouse roof. That job is all
12off balance--squat, hammer, body skewed
13against the incline, heft the bunder,
14daub the tar, squat. Talking,
15as we always talked, not about living
16past the age of thirty with its
17labyrinthine perils: getting hooked,
18steady job, kids, business suit. Fuck that. The roof
19sloped upward like a take-off ramp
20waiting for Evel Knievel, pointing into open sky. Beyond it
21twenty feet or so of concrete wharf before
22the blue-black water of the lake. Danny said
23that he could make it, easy. We said
24never. He said case of beer, put up
25or shut up. We said
26asshole. Frank said first he should go get our beer
27because he wasn’t going to get it paralysed or dead.
28Everybody got up, taking this excuse
29to stretch and smoke and pace the roof
30from eaves to peak, discussing gravity
31and Steve McQueen, who never used a stunt man, Danny’s
32life expectancy, and whether that should be a case
33of Export or O’Keefe’s. We knew what this was--
34ongoing argument to fray
35the tedium of work akin to filter vs. plain,
36stick shift vs. automatic, condom vs.
37pulling out in time. We flicked our butts toward the lake
38and got back to the job. And then, amid the squat,
39hammer, heft, no one saw him go. Suddenly he
40wasn’t there, just his boots
41with his hammer stuck inside one like a heavy-headed
42flower. Back then it was bizarre that,
43after all that banter, he should be so silent,
44so inward with it just to
45run off into sky. Later I thought,
46cool. Still later I think it makes sense his voice should
47sink back into breath and breath
48devote itself to taking in whatever air
49might have to say on that short flight between the roof
50and the rest of his natural life.
RPO poem Editors
Ian Lancashire
RPO Edition
2011