Dominique Béchard

Dominique Béchard

Metaxy

Walked half a day to reach the place where the wild chickens live. Or, where the mist in the swale assumes the shape of chickens. No—these are tangible birds, clothed in sun, their bodies embossing the mist with a glow. They are nibbling at larvae and they are alchemists of cloud. Love is so powerful that it makes everything ordinary, wrote the anonymous theologian. I can only imagine it: an unimaginable place where desire has no object. Where order means: to be swallowed up.

Last year marked a fatal surge in drug overdoses across the continent. Seventy-two thousand dead in the United States. A Canadian killed every couple of hours. I knew only two of them by name. J. lowered himself to the bathroom floor and never got up. For N. it was more violent. Now, in 2020: the graph’s red tendril lifts tenderly toward an incalculable grief. Frank Stanford: I am thinking of the dead / Who are still with us. Katie Ford, describing the addict: between, but needing, two worlds.

On the walk back, the sun releases its afternoons. At first, the river is flung open by a peripheral light: softened into transparency. You can see the bottom: invertebrates, roots whose stalks rise above water. Then begins a clumsy mirroring: along the surface: a fractured crow, and the sun itself, lurching from a reed’s puncture. For the final mile, the river is too dazzling to look at, though its echoes splinter thought: a sorrow that is the meeting-point of resignation and fire.