A middle-aged British sailor remembers, decades afterwards, a strange "human-and-not-human" incident in the colonial port of Bombay. A man walking his dog near the Katyn monument in Toronto wonders at signs, and at the "mother-deep" ocean of human suffering. In a moment "out of an airport," the speakers and story-tellers of the Mackenzie River regroup and ready themselves, not for a rescue, but for the future. Blue jays in the pine forests of the Great Basin turn through a death-dance of forgetfulness and fecundity. A traveller on a snow-bound plane straightens his spine to bear the difficult reality of an unstoried present. A man buries his long-dead father"s alpine equipment beneath a mountain in California, and finds a new welcome in the familiar "noise of chaos."

Notes for a Rescue Narrative moves deftly between metrical and free verse forms, and includes homages to Horace, Eugenio Montale, and Antonio Machado.