Revisionist Western
by Joseph Kidney
Banff, AB
You slept beneath a mountain named for the tunnel
nobody ended up drilling through it. When you woke,
the skies, lavishing snow, had wrapped the trees
in straitjackets. Scrubbing your body with coal tar soap,
you felt like an oil painting being swabbed by a restorer
with petroleum solvent. But nothing, not the air-cure,
not the weapons-grade enthusiasm of the magpies,
could make the situation an occasion, which is to say
could lift up your heart. Outside, as if absolving,
a snowmobile dragging a culvert pipe smoothly erased
the divots dug by boots. Bighorn sheep, moseying, browsed
their itinerant way across the invisible line that turns
them into game. A sedge the locals call more-of-the-same
attempted to stifle the ground with a green consensus.
Your task today, as on most days, was to disinfect
bravery of the minor cruelties that in their wildness
compromise the charges they defend, as with a sword
that only remains an emblem of nobility so long
as it stays undrawn. Chasing the fugue of itself, a wind
you waited to blow your scent upriver screamed
through every saddle, notch, and cornice of the range.
In a pocket of deadfall, a saw-whet owl, no bigger
than a scapula, raised a small and slackening cry
the woods absorbed into a thing you could not help
but liken to memory, even if it lacked the power
of retrieval. You had funny ways of putting it, as in:
the verdict of your sorrow, a finish on your thinking,
a glacier cinched against the stone and grinding up
the very rock flour that, scenically, in summer, greens
the paddle-beaten lake. It seemed you found yourself
weeping more often, which somehow felt like levitation.
Which was when you saw, above you, the ice climber:
an asterisk, spidering higher, hacking himself up
the stalled unrolling blue that in abbreviated crunches
released, you thought, a snippet of its unfrozen roaring
every time he drove an axe into its body. Laughter
it sounded like, bubbling up from lungs full of glue.
Delirious, you watched an elk herd stamp out the lilies
as though limiting an outbreak of rumor and suggestion.
At last, they lie down to rest by dropping to their knees.
Joseph Kidney is the author of Devotional Forensics (icehouse poetry), winner of the Griffin Poetry Canadian First Book Prize. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The New Yorker, The Iowa Review, Copper Nickel, The Cincinnati Review, and Best Canadian Poetry. He won a National Magazine Award Gold Medal for Poetry and the Poem of the Year award from Arc Poetry Magazine. He currently works as a lecturer at Stanford University, where he completed his PhD in Renaissance drama.