The power dive, the clash-and-roll, the steep
veer that limns the knife edge
hidden in the wind, the proto-
contrapuntal game of tag:
this is the improv
at the heart of things, this stirring up
of trouble, this festival of riffs.
They jam until the air
is pregnant with polyphony, with Scott
LaFaro meets Bill Evans, do-si-do
meets alley-oop I love you Abbott
and Costello, flirt with Escher, flirt with
Jackson Pollock, hold the moment in your wingpit, then
buckle, fold, toss yourself like a crumpled draught
and come to roost.
To make the spirits
envious. To make them laugh. What if
we snuck up on the minuet
and goosed it with this jalapeño?
What if we stole those thick
black eels that live inside despair
and ate them like electrical
spaghetti? Yowp. Such schemes they
palaver in Polyglot, having scavenged Yiddish,
Irish, !Kung, English, and
Inuktitut. Intro-
aggroverts of small-b being,
they can project a kark across the Malahat or swallow it –
clock. Glottal stop,
glottal glide, doorbell
crossed with oboe, oboe
crossed with short-eared owl. Tók.
To make the spirits
give themselves away.
With a rustle of wings like a whispered
death wish one of them swings
down to check me out,
perched on the summit writing
yowp, writing tók and wörk, writing what
would it be like to be so casual and acute
in my little blue notebook filled with
phrases, numbers, recipes,
and to-do lists.