Poems

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Dirk McDermott

1956 –

Fellow Scout who could climb and touch
the gold ball at the top of the flagpole,
and do math three grades ahead
under his crewcut. I need a calculator
to figure how long since I spoke his name.
How long since I offered my own blue
neckerchief to wipe his always runny nose.
But last night in smoke, steam, and rain
beside a wrecked train I told him how happy
I felt in the igloo we’d built, how handsome
a cub he’d been crawling on all fours
up the twilit tunnel to me. In a hoarse
whisper and never looking at his face.

Patrick Donnelly is the author of Willow Hammer (Four Way Books, 2025), Little-Known Operas (Four Way Books, 2019), and Nocturnes of the Brothel of Ruin (Four Way Books, 2012) among other titles.

About Patrick Donnelly

Themes

About this Poem

“Poems may arise from dreams, but when it comes to writing a poem based on a dream, I find it most interesting to leave it unclear whether we’re actually in a dream, or some other kind of altered state, or whether ordinary life has suddenly slipped into one of its less realistic episodes. In the end, I’m not sure those states are substantially different, given how our most intense feelings and memories shape what we see of the world, and what we think it means.”
—Patrick Donnelly

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A Postcard of Christ Carrying the Cross,

circle of Giovanni Bellini circa 1505 oil on wood, is what
he fits between his third and fourth weekly pill boxes,

to remind himself to reorder. His routine about the anti-
virals is of greater magnitude, maybe, than the one in which

Mrs. Gardner used to place a vase of violets in front
of the painting, when she owned it. This card’s only

a reproduction of the Passion, not the original. But we’ve seen
how imitation and daily use can make of pity and fear

Patrick Donnelly

2015

Paradise on Black Ice

Heaven hunts round for those that find itself below, and then it snatches.
—Emily Dickinson

I wind
the sheet of elegy

while he's still alive, I can't help it,
I follow his breath while he sleeps,

greet each coming and going,
with an Ave.
                  (Because of how
the quick
become the dead.)

But right now he's showering
with a gospel choir, radio

half on and half off that station.
And today's heaven is half hell,

half whole, half hurt,
hunting every naked thing

with the same harsh delight.

Patrick Donnelly

2012

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Dirk McDermott

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