Birding in the Glass Age of Isolation
Curtis LeBlanc
Birding in the Glass Age of Isolation
Copyright © Curtis LeBlanc, 2020
all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright, the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency, www.accesscopyright.ca, [email protected].
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cover photograph: Kathryn Prescott
cover design & typography: Carleton Wilson
Nightwood Editions acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada, and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council.
This book has been produced on 100% post-consumer recycled, ancient-forest-free paper, processed chlorine-free and printed with vegetable-based dyes.
Printed and bound in Canada.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: Birding in the glass age of isolation / Curtis LeBlanc.
Names: LeBlanc, Curtis, author.
Description: Poems.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190201177 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190201207 | ISBN 9780889713680 (softcover) | ISBN 9780889713697 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PS8623.E32775 B57 2020 | DDC C811/.6—dc23
for Mallory
In a pine tree, A few yards from my window sill A brilliant blue jay is springing up and down, up and down, On a branch. I laugh, as I see him abandon himself To entire delight, for he knows as well as I do That the branch will not break.
– James Wright
It is one of those common bodies that felt it could not exist without loving, but has in fact gone on and on without love.
– CD Wright
Frankenfish
All the stormwater ponds in my hometown are overrun by giant goldfish, insatiable as teenagers demanding new love over and over, going from bus stop to bus stop eating everything they can afford with their grocery-store cheques and sliding-scale allowances.
I’ve been a sucker for the tragedy of memory, snuck into the beach-town kids’ bingo tournament, slipped the neighbour boy a five to buy contraband cards to play with. I won an orange foam football on a vertical line and claimed my kid was back in bed, told the caller this is what he would’ve wanted.
That’s all this is. Beer drunk from an inconspicuous coffee cup at the picnic table of a pitch-dark summer. Fresh crab caught between two tennis racquets, underbellies bashed in with the handle of a hairbrush. Dreams of planes emergency landing in the streets of Manhattan as we collect our bags and go for coffee after.
I’m twenty-six, overrun with the impossibility of ebbing back to KerPlunk or pick-up sticks. Drinking Canadian Club in an empty soccer field minutes before lightning. Climbing elementary school roofs for a better view. Holding an almost-stranger’s soft hand while birds of prey scan the lake for fresh catch.
Today, in St. Albert, Alberta, they’re poisoning the ponds with rotenone. Public works will scoop the dead with tiny nets into buckets. The official statement reads: Any future regretful owners are to return their pets to the point of sale, or else kill and bury them. Fine if the past won’t take me back. But I want to live.
On Seeing My Father in Bruegel’s Winter Landscape with Skaters and a Bird Trap
He’s the one who told me how he gathered his skates and, like any kid with lips for lying, told his mother he was meeting friends. He walked five blocks to the Sturgeon River to glide, alone, from Perron Street to the trestle bridge. His feet, steel reeds caught in a current of his own making. In Bruegel, he might see himself, but not in the skaters, together with arms linked, gliding on the green pond of a place nothing like the one he suffered in. He’s in the birds, grounded, about to croak beneath the wooden deadfall. Unhappiness, a solid sheet dropping often on top of him.
Even in Bruges, before he idled the rental in the street to relieve himself in a café we had no intention of sitting in, he and I found a way to be unhappy together. It was our sleight-of-hand trick, a father of absolutes and a son stuck in liminal splits. The best photo I ever took of him: in anger, cussing me out in the shadow of the Belfry, that famous bell tower. He was somehow more himself that way, finally spilling over the lip of his unacceptable demureness, mostly quietude and kindness in the body of a man at odds with the men who held themselves above him.
Father, I have become you, some small shape in the foreground, bracing myself for another record winter and waiting for the sky to fall.
Birding in the Glass Age of Isolation
Whoever said kill to a young boy first is probably to blame for this shotgun settled on my shoulder,
barrel pointed to the sky above my back. Earlier we blasted a robin’s-egg-blue recliner to strips, waiting on breakfast.
Hangover sweat collects in the bottoms of our gumboots. We’re set to shoot ourselves a grouse—
haven’t even seen one yet—but we heard how the blood dripped from the chin of Dan’s white bichon frise
after it got into the entrails of a fresh roadside kill near the neighbour’s barbed-wire fence.
Nick, camera hung like a kettle bell around his neck, tells me the two best birders in Edmonton never leave
their minivan. Not until a bay-breasted warbler or a northern goshawk has been identified as perching
on a branch. We bushwhack into Crown land at the south edge of Jared’s Flatbush ranch. In the bare wafer-board shack:
German pulp westerns, The Glass Bees by Ernst Jünger, interspersed with smut on the shelves of tenants past.
Man-made pond dyed a deep green to keep algae from blooming, escaped rabbits remembered by fur caught
in the chicken wire of their cages. Smartphone held high, Nick repeats a mating song with his Bird Calls app.
Be still, he says, and listen for the clack- clack, clack-clack. Spruce grouse will be on the forest bed, but taste
like the bitter red buds they’re named for. Ruffies, with their rumpled black necks, gorge themselves on