Hello, New Year

Marc McKee

It’s one thing to be hopeful and to be full

of feathers is another and it’s a third to

conflate the two and do fourth things

even survive being thought of?

Five fingers on fire close into a metaphor

about how we’ll never, never ever, never ever.

The smoke above the hospital is beautiful.

The smoke above the hospital was beautiful.

Above the hospital, the smoke looked

and seemed, its seams dissolved

into memory which is a terrible way

to tell time in the cold. I misread

the “Creve Coeur Camera” sign

of the shop beside the supermarket

as “Cri De Coeur Camera” like it is my job

to misread signs. Something beautiful arrived

in a helicopter, something beautiful left

forever. Here we go again, against,

aghast. Something in us floats, floated,

our feet dragging through future ruins.

I know, “something” is an ulcer

on any reaching, making intelligence

but the ulcer wants what it wants, to be

something after all. For an awful whale,

a moment tries to beach itself, it does,

I learn Tomaž has died

then it is a magnet of terrible power

when I know for certain Tomaž has died.

I convalesce, selfish as a branch punished

mildly by wind—Tomaž lived! and will,

but it’s only the kind of enough

nothing ever is. I feel I am being

ironed, and it all only burns. I feel

the subtraction machine subtracting

my maneuvers. I feel the abacus

in my brain, that accordion, finally.

Finally licked into char. Five. Now any chair

I steal into for any length of time

has three unsteady legs. Cri cri cri, etc.

It would be a swell time to have a handle on

any methodology for rising into the sky,

a really great time to turn into a bird.

What a time! the sun is out and it is snowing

and I am as close to being a plastic sword

as I ever have been. How I would love

some toddler coming into their tongues

or some beloved ancient to sentence me.

How I will love the sound

of my own final clatter, but

only if it comes when I am tossed aside

to signal the end of hostilities.