George Murray has recently relocated from Toronto to New York City. His latest book is The Cottage Builder's Letter (McClelland and Stewart, 2001). His poetry is appearing or forthcoming in The Iowa Review, The Mid-American Review, The Ontario Review, and Pequod.

The Encampment Seconds after it takes root in the tinder mix of scrub and new brush, your fire releases a breath of smoke that lifts up as though it is an elderly man rising from an age-old crouch. What you found in the woods near the lake so suits your needs - a tree in which to store your goods, a brook with clear water to wash wounds, fresh grass, an overhung knoll in which to sleep. You have been busy with the life of a hunter - the watching, the gathering, the stalking, killing, carving, the emptying of meat from skin, the removal of heads. A thought shoots across the red and blue mist of your mind, mimicking a star streaking across the banded twilight - a particular omen in the length of its tail. There will pass in childbirth a woman, you've seen the vision - the grey water of the drowned falling from her mouth, running down her neck and breasts as though she is the source of a spring. On the lake where the moon has turned the water to milk, a lone man in a canoe drifts by, and you cannot tell whether he is looking at you or the dying fire or the dark ring of trees. Nothing will ever be perfect again, you think, falling back into sleep - your encampment's bed will forever be made with sheets of stone, the love made under the damp covers breeding only darkness and cold silence. The Steampipe In the abandoned yard a steampipe stands from the ground, belching - the locals have drawn markings in charcoal around the lip and down the western side. What still works below the fallow dirt, what mechanism goes unchecked? Can it be a surprise in this remaining world when any seemingly causeless system produces an effect? Twenty miles away a man who once played the flute by holding its mouth to the pipe's flow of wet air is taking his last sighs in the skin of some animal - two years ago he took a bullet to the head while hunting with a brother, but only now is dying of lead poisoning. Somewhere below the very ground on which the funerary wood is being erected as he dies, a deep boiler huffs away, forgotten and long past its due - its emphysemic breath mimicking the smoke rising from the base of the pyre, turning gears in a machine too big to be seen. What still feeds it? What fuel propels its invisible inferno? What a laugh, he thinks, slipping away by the fire he watched his family build - and the rings of stone glow for long hours after the embers blacken to charcoal. The Marquee Well, here we are - only late for the show by moments or years, yet just in time for the story to begin - and the marquee that hangs over the empty square in the rain is as black as the wall behind it. Though the glass is still there, there remains not a single bulb with filament intact - yet by the buzz in the mist one might suspect power still flows through some of the copper wiring - the intermittent current of marching ants that once lit up the night and signaled the start of something big, something beyond the everyday, something to escape to - this. Just outside the city limits the fish have returned to a lake once so polluted even the weeds died - in fact, the water is so plentiful it looks as though one might simply reach in and close a fist around any flash of silver and come away with a catch - all escape routes guarded by their own bodies - red herrings - each chance for survival now based on lottery odds better than those offered by an earlier time. This is a species at its most raw - throwing itself against the locked door of population and starvation as though, given a proper pounding, the hinges might fly off to reveal what lies beyond. There is a pulse somewhere in the wet darkness surrounding the theatre, a spark that builds upon itself in a pleasurable world of reverse physics - but of course an electric hum could come from anything in these parts, these days - and the show ended some time ago to bad reviews and an empty house. Looking out from within a darkened room, one sees a heavy figure standing in the door, and when the arch suddenly lightens one could be excused for asking - has someone stepped out of the room or in? Really the only way to tell what's truly going on under the surface of water and glass is to remove one of the black bulbs and slip a willing finger inside. The Valley So far. We are so far out from everything the mules cannot go on, the camels are landing chin first in the dust - so far the ship's stores are reduced to rinds and crumbs, so far our meagerly-dressed guide has long since turned back to the thick air of her jungle cave. Who could have guessed we would be the hardy ones, who would have thought it would be us cresting the rocky hills, parting the underbrush with long knives, sluicing over the final waterfalls - our bodies falling headlong into an undiscovered country where the only things familiar that awaited our arrival were the stars, disease, roaches and the bones of our guide. The Minefield Brush holly on this mess, brush oak, treat the land with a poultice of holy water and wort, heal the holes in the ground with salves made of moss and earth - use fireweed, use morphine, use hemlock, stuff the craters with dark soil and the seeds of wildflowers - replace your divots! the sign reads at the mouth of the minefield. One day we will decorate with beehives and razor blades - one day we will coat the walls with various combinations of excreta - one day water will refuse to blast from the mouths of canons and protestors will run wild, and the buildings so calculatingly cleaned of nuclear shadows will accumulate the Bacchanal silhouettes of a riot. The helmet on this head is a pea, has stopped a bullet, but the head rests on a spike instead of a neck! Dear Lord, they removed the chain from his tongue and replaced it with a ball of surgical steel - he now speaks twice as often, but only half as well. Each gulf, each pit, each cavity and its accompanying stain, each ghostly limb of a passerby - partial absences that beg us to question whether there will ever be another Rome, another Sumer, Xanadu, Bethlehem - whether there has ever been a presence with our best interests in mind.