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Chapter One: Nesting
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
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3 Chapter One Nesting A thatched cottage is set on the ground like a nest in a field. And a wren’s nest is a thatched cottage, because it is a covered, round nest. – Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (98) [W]e have a proverb according to which men can do everything except build a bird’s nest. – Ambroise Paré, qtd. in Bachelard (92) Awonderful tension resides in Don McKay’s poetics between the domestic nest—often, but not always, the kitchen—and the urge to get outside where observations can be made. Two poems appearing together in McKay’s breakthrough book Birding, or desire (1983)1 get at this tension in different ways. Like the dog at the end of “Smash the Windows” (114), each of us will have had, by the time we die, a “brief / but action-packed career.” McKay has a knack for reminding us of our species’ youth in evolutionary (and geologic) terms. The poem that ends with a dog“crashing through the window” is—up to that slightly funny, slightly sad moment—a birthday poem for the speaker’s daughter.While a thirteenth birthday is perhaps premature for empty-nest anxieties to take hold, crossing the threshold between child and teenager invites both nostalgia and a sense of mortality. After an evening celebrating “with scotch and old-time fiddle music,”“smoke and / bawdy ancient English folksongs”—presumably the birthday girl did not partake of scotch and smoking and song—friends begin to leave. The final gift comes from time itself: memories of past significant events, including the moment ten minutes after her birth that the daughter first locked eyes with her father. Reminiscing thus aims to protect against the inevitable forward -looking reality that children grow up and leave the family home— insert the appropriate cliché about leaving the nest here. That she is only 4 • Chapter One thirteen and unlikely to fly the coop just yet comforts the parents, to be sure; but that damn dog, “like the appendix of the party,” shatters from without that comfort and any sense of domestic safety. The window is a threshold apposite to the call in Ornithologies of Desire to pay attention to what’s outside. From a parental perspective, the dog crashing through the window—shortening if not ending his life—augurs ill for a child on the verge of entering the wide world. The poem’s title, however, anticipates the ending while offering a gloss on its metaphorical significance. The imperative to smash the windows issues a challenge to acknowledge wilderness as part of domestic space—its dangers as well as its potential—and to act on an animal desire to walk among grasses and trees and mammals and birds. Deliberate acts of breaking out of domesticated space to exist sensuously in the world beyond home prefigure the dog’s inadvertent violence, which rends the speaker from his nostalgic reverie. Movement between inside and outside occupies the speaker in “Simply Because Light”(115), too, though in a far less violent manner. The domestic scene, with the speaker“disparaging the dishes”his spouse is trying to wash, sets up a string of memories and desires for memories related to birth and children, the vagaries of marriage, and a dialectics of inside and outside, as Gaston Bachelard would put it. Light “falling a certain way through the dining room widow” provides a stimulus for the speaker to get outside and “lapse in speech on the balcony.” That he wants “memories that germinate” and children who “wonder at the seed they were” reaffirms the extent to which home in much of McKay’s work resembles a nest from which all must leave even as all require the basic protections nests and other domiciles offer. The window in this poem remains intact, yet the way it admits crepuscular light agitates the speaker in ways that recall the dog’s agitation in “Smash the Windows.” Similarly, by responding to the light’s clarion call in “Simply Because Light” in a manner that affirms a middle-class domesticity —all the speaker wants is to “have a beer / on the balcony instead of” ruminating indoors and contemplating memories and memories-to-be— the speaker enacts a movement from inside to outside in a safe, comfortable manner. Still, the implicit violence of “Smash the Windows”followed by the complicit violence of domestic life—the speaker recalls a “fight in the hotel in Edinburgh” alongside “other fights...