Something to it, the thought
of a people like its clime
or thereby impressed—
my lunchtime lassitude dissolved
the minute I moved from the sun
to this shadowed grass.
I could invent the wheel now
& soon the cotton gin
and steam engine &
let’s not forget
it won’t be long now
before nuclear fission.
Nothing’s beyond
my airconditioned ken.
My offshore multinational’s
humming more power
than the biggest powerstation in Hoboken.
My shadowed shade
my intemperate glade my big fat thrum.
Let’s call it progress, this.
Let’s call it whatever it is.
BELFAST
Your velvet hills came to me
last night in the pool
how they hugged the fraught city
the pubs filled and buzzing
the Europa unbombed now for years.
Your political murals are kitsch
and history’s a ditch
for lying if we let
the gravediggers
name us. Let’s bury
our pseudonyms
all undisclosed.
Was Scarlett O’Hara’s father
a blustering Ulsterman
or was he a peasant
like granddad from Wicklow
tender and fond amidst the riot
and kind to his slaves
but for the obvious?
White people are weird
with their vitamin D
and sunravaged skin.
So far from an equator
it’s hard to walk the line
in a cleaved world.
Orange, green, navy blue
the colors are weapons
as were some horses
in the 19th century.
Freed by machines
see how they race
on fragile ankles—
beauty a late flower
of disuse. Your storefronts
were boarded, your university
Victorian, the linen quarter
defunct. The solid brick
that shelters us unmortared
smashed a window.
Your sky hung low your beer
rode high your visiting Masons
sober and punctual.
A Days Inn here
is a Days Inn anywhere
but for the marchers gathering
their ribbons’ gaud at odds
with their drawn gaunt faces
shut like a purse
around an old watch
that still keeps time
DEBATABLE LAND
The palest green immerings on the slopes
the snow’d made white near overspread
the snowdrops ungeared for fighting
yet strive they do to live in this suddenly
coldened place.
The silence of the knowes rising above
St Mary’s Loch is almost the silence
of nearby graves but the yow-trummle
pierces the mizzle we’ve decided
to plow though.
Other people’s disputes are not yours
till they are. Whose debatable land
did you walk on whose unmarked graves?
The village of free blacks buried below
Central Park.
The Hanging Tree an English elm anchoring
a corner of Washington Square Park
knows nothing of the disintegrated dead
who long fed its soon-to-be
commemorated roots.
Let’s unpeel the world
and bite that big fruit the earth
it took us too long to remember
well-being just being holy land just land
the hanging tree a tree the son
of man a man.
THINGS OF AUGUST
Not fog not hail not sleet
but rain boring
as ever the same
rain less acidic
now the Midwest has failed
and new laws prevailed.
We shall abandon
our cars. We shall walk
unadorned under stars
whose names we shall learn
in four languages, minimum.
Our maximum velocity
will be no faster
than an average human can run.
Everything scaled
once again to the body.
The body? My amplified
brain’s going haywire
not to mention
my juiced-up tits
and pumped lips. An army
of amputees marches
on Dacron prosthetics
the military should do better by.
I was nostalgic
until I got over it.
My diabetic sister’s living
and a million women past
predicted deaths in childbirth.
Good. I can’t think
my way out of this
covert. I’ll just stay
here with the soft frightened
rabbits while the hunters
storm the brambles looking
for whatever today’s kill might be.
Those hunters who fed
or still feed me.
REPLAY / REPEAT
Amazing they still do it, kids—
climb trees they’ve eyed for years
in the park, their bicycles
braced against granite hewn
hauled & heaved into a miniature
New Hampshire Stonehenge …
Your white-pined mind
fringed with Frisbees saucering
the summer into a common
past—look, it’s here! two red
discs! & the goldplated trophies
everyone gets for team effort.
Human beings always run
in groups. Sure there’s a solitary
walker, can’t bother
him, iPod breaking his brain
into convolutions
you’ll never get the hang of.
Go skateboard yourself.
My maneuvers are old-
school, yes, but so’s school
& summer & children
& these fuckedup resilient trees
which tell time like the Druids
by the same old same old sun.
BROADBAND
Before I open my mind
to the sludge
the open connection
will carry
let me tarry
with archaic diction
and ancient bodies
the sun & my own
shaped by a code
unfolding itself
through millennia.
For thousands of years
art had no fashion
was the beautiful
drawing we did.
In cave after cave
the ochred bison run
by charcoaled aurochs
and a delicate ibex
an opposable thumb
grasped. Don’t think
they’ve gone
from your mind
I remind myself
rousing from sleep
the screen of my brain
WESTERN
I can see the big sky
people have a point
the clouds mounting high
above the lake give
the lie to the fat claims
of mountains. The eye
requires a horizon
Thoreau somewhere sd.
Somewhere over yesterday’s
rainbow the clouds compact
of mysteries rise
and billow, ample sheets
in the blue. The line
is an
orienting
thing. The horizon
the plumb line the halyard
we tightened for good
sailing. How we want
the world rigged tight
yet not rigged against
us. In Texas Montana
Dakota they know it
the cattle rounded
up for decades
into a genre near dead
as the passenger
pigeons that famously
darkened the sky
V
HOROSCOPE
Again the white blanket
icicles pierce.
The fierce teeth
of steel-framed snowshoes
bite the trail open.
Where the hardwoods stand
and rarely bend
the wind blows hard
an explosion of snow
like flour dusting
the baker in a shop
long since shuttered.
In this our post-shame century
we will reclaim
the old nouns
unembarrassed.
If it rains
we’ll say oh
there’s rain.
If she falls
out of love
with you you’ll carry
your love on a gold plate
to the forest and bury it
in the Indian graveyard.
Pioneers do not
only despoil.
The sweet knees
of oxen have pressed
a path for me.
A lone chickadee
undaunted thing
sings in the snow.
Flakes appear
as if out of air
but surely they come
from somewhere
bearing what news
from the troposphere.
The sky’s shifted
and Capricorns abandon
themselves to a Sagittarian
line. I like
this weird axis.
In 23,000 years
it will become again
the same sky
the Babylonians scanned.
MOSS LAKE
I eat this silence
like bread.
The white lake
replaces my head.
I am cold & calm
as the untracked snows.
SKYWATCH
a brace of stars
a shivered benediction
of moon
Latin splashes
the firmament
as if it were universal
as the Milky Way
scanned by Chinese poets
& Egyptian astrologers
how not to fall
in the permanent black
unrelieved
except tonight
by this light
QUIET CAR
the willow’s lost its hair
the snow’s receded almost everywhere
and you are riding in the quiet car
the branches mostly bare
but the thin icesheets that cracked and chimed the pond
have vanished into water
while you are riding in the quiet car
walking around the reservoir
canvasbacks gliding on the water
the path two miles, perhaps a bit more
while you are riding in the quiet car
soon I will climb in the old blue car
and drive to Back Bay, not too far
from you my love now riding in the quiet car
SONG
Love’s in Gloucester
setting a lobster pot
in her mind.
Love’s in Gloucester
feeling the wind’s effect
on inner and outer shoreline.
Love’s in Gloucester
where the whalers once sailed
and the cod’s collapsed
but the sea the sea
calls to whoever
has ears for what’s leaving and left.
HER SUMMERMINDEDNESS
Her summermindedness
embraces all full green things
& banishes nothing.
The dragonfly helicoptering
over the pond the deerflies
harassing the swimmers
& the leech on the leg linger forever.
Everything a scale
of clear intervals
no roadkill can mar.
The baby spiny thing
rubbing itself against
or was it scratching
the bark of a thin tree
by the roadside.
The speechless waddle
caught in the headlights
of late cars by the lake
moonlit and perfect
for canoeing in her summer mind.
O porcupine
spine in the mind
even a blithe summer mind
swerves from your shine
LOCAL HABITATION
The wildflowers
of New Hampshire
have yet to earn their names.
Flagrant apparent
they litter the meadow
casual sprays in patches
on the edges the gravel
almost reaches.
Sure there are
daisies and clover
beyond that
things remain
unspecified.
It seems rude
to pry. Elsewhere
it’s called good
old simple asking.
Here wonder’s
best kept secret.
Don’t leak
your want
I’ve learned
not a native
but not wild enough
to resist
what constricts
a field
of uncut flowers.
THE FACT OF A MEADOW
North of Boston
roads diverge.
Downed birches
clog the Nubanusit.
A meadow made
a lightning field
by flashing flies
reclaims its green
each morning.
What the clouds now pass
you will not pass.
Those flies
were beetles.
Pine needles grow
in fascicles sewn
like Dickinson’s poems.
A stone wall
stumbled on
stubs the mind
into an old ache—
what did you make
what did you make
of all diminished things
MÄRCHEN
The timbering done
the afternoon rings out
an aftermath.
What euphemism
would you not choose
in this multi-use
forest? I’ve left
crumbs for returning
the way back
marked by tiretracks,
lopped branches.
I’ve left words
in woods the thrushes
sing in refusing
the extinction
of the day. Pines
guard the path.
The way we come
back will not
be this way.
ELSEWHERE
The beer was nice
but not what we wanted
nor the rain nor the century
nor the actual children
we had. Let’s not talk
about the parents. The forsythia
yellowed the hedges. So there
sd the spring. So what
the jay shrieked. A concussion
of air stripped the inner ear
vessels clean but for the gist
we needed to hear by.
A siren sang this evening’s aria
after a basketball’d
reci
tative. In other places
other people thought through
different birds. They eat
dog meat there. We refrain
from outright condemnation.
Everywhere we know
the sun is setting
in an absolute sky.
ENOUGH WITH THE SWAN SONG
The woods are words
the turkeys spell
with their feet
their pine-needled path
a wild way
we won’t take.
The sheep that bleats
in the night escapes
a starry declivity
we must be rescued from.
The rocks rest
below mosses, the pines
outtop the hemlock.
Flat ferns fan the wind
that will not break
this heat. I am lonely
with the sculpted edges
of fat leaves on low shrubs.
Ingrate soloist the chorus
is just beginning
and that bodacious robin
doesn’t care if you join.
ENVOI
yesterday
I sat on a swing
and swung
will I do this for ever
will I never
not be a child
the grave
my last crib
* * *
I noticed to-day under a tree
nobody was singing to me
but oh there was singing
and there was that one tree
Acknowledgments
Thanks to the editors and publishers of the following journals and forums, where some of these poems first appeared, sometimes in different form: The Academy of American Poets “Poem-A-Day” series, The American Reader, The Cortland Review, Grey, The Kenyon Review, Literary Imagination, The New Yorker, nonsite.org, The Paris Review, Plume, Poetry, Port, Psychology Tomorrow Magazine, Shearsman, and The Wallace Stevens Journal.
My deepest gratitude as well to the Liguria Study Center for the Arts and Humanities / The Bogliasco Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo, which granted residencies that supported the writing of this book. Their air is everywhere here.
To Jeff Clark, again. To Christopher Richards.
And to Eric William Carroll, of the blue line.
To Jonathan Galassi, compadre.
* * *
For L: mio disio però non cangia il verde.
Also by Maureen N. McLane
Same Life
World Enough
My Poets
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2014 by Maureen N. McLane
All rights reserved
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