Ornithologies of Desire: Ecocritical Essays, Avian Poetics, and Don McKay

Ending: Ravens

223 Ending a convenient place to end (though not to conclude). – Don McKay, “The Bushtits’ Nest” (V 106) RAVENS maybe I will find myself back out here with the traffic, picking up popcans, listening for the moment when a raven takes a piece of sky, packs it like a snowball, and speaks. – Don McKay, “On Foot to the Bypass Esso Postal Outlet” (A 55) To end is not necessarily to conclude. Despite the finite materiality of this book, of all books, the ideas I hope reach beyond the physical boundaries of the page. To do what? To invite others into a conversation. What is a book of criticism if not a constant search for “a convenient place to end (though not to conclude)” (McKay V 107)? Perhaps, as the popular Canadian band the Tragically Hip declare, I have been “looking for a place to happen / getting lost along the way.”A place to happen is a place to end these ecocritical essays, then, but not to conclude the discussions about ecocriticism and avian poetics shaped by Don McKay’s words. Here I offer myself a way out while offering you—reader, student, birder-critic—possible ways back in. To begin looking for your own ways to happen and get lost along the way. McKay’s raven poems represent an ecotone where bird and rock, ornithology and geology, speech and deep time come together and put us humans in our place among the most recent of natural phenomena. Here, at the end. 224 • Ending Just as Halitherses demonstrated a capacity for translating what he learned from birds, McKay shares through his poetry what he has learned from birds and stones and trees. More accurately, he shares what he has learned from bushtits and basalt and black spruce and from the various interactions he has observed. He also, as his species specificity, his lyric humility, and his distrust of language suggest, gives credit where credit is due, preferring to sabotage what Keats identified as the “wordsworthian or egotistical sublime” typical of traditional lyric poetry by writing in spite of the faults and failings of a poet. Sometimes the proximity afforded by speci- ficity results in an ironic distancing between poet and subject. A late poem, “Song of the Saxifrage to the Rock” (S/S 10),1 expresses this irony even as the title announces its link to McKay’s homage to and ohmage of birdsong. Uncharacteristically, McKay writes this poem in the voice of a plant addressing a rock, rather than the unnamed birder-poet (or watcher, or excursionist figure) of other poems, who often addresses an unidentified listener. Saxifrage, also called rockfoil, is a fairly common plant native to subarctic, temperate regions. This saxifrage, though, asks a lot of questions, including one about other plants that have attempted to grow on the basalt: “How many fingerholds / have failed, been blown or washed away, unworthy / of your dignified avoirdupois, your strict / hexagonal heart?” This song, this homage, sounds like a love song as the saxifrage lauds “Monsieur Basalt” for being heavier with the past than “the twentieth century.” The saxifrage sounds, actually, quite similar to McKay’s humble birder-poet, especially during the poem’s final lines, in which several McKavian ideas come together in an attempt to nudge the rock, respectfully, closer toward stone: Listen, slow one let me be your fool, let me sit on your front porch in my underwear and tell you risqué stories about death. Together we will mix our dust and luck and turn ourself into the archipelago of nooks. More than simply a poet, the saxifrage is a geopoet whose words obviously “fumble in their attempts” to do the basalt justice. Willing to be the fool, to sit half-naked on a porch, the saxifrage must invent words to express its ecotonal position; the awkward reflexive pronoun“ourself” simultaneously reveals the limitations of language and the creative desire to use language against itself as a method of checking its colonizing tendencies.Articulating an ecological relation, the saxifrage also expresses with the term“ourself”an awareness of individual ontology coeval with a group ontology. The self lives Ravens • 225 contemporaneously with a diverse, polyphonic community of organisms and other nonliving matter within an“archipelago of nooks.”This saxifrage sings as if in response to William Rueckert’s question, at the conclusion of his experiment in ecocriticism, about how...