Hello, New Year

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.

Credit

Copyright © 2019 by Marc McKee. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 4, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.

About this Poem

“Like several of my poems, this is a suitcase overpacked in a hurry, oscillating between fits of delicate care, grasping levity, and desperation. If we look at the first four lines, the generative ruckus is identifiable: there’s a reference to and complication of Emily Dickinson’s oft-quoted ‘Hope is the thing with feathers,’ which rides into a half-reference to comedy’s rule of three. The simplest understanding of the Hegelian dialectic sprints further into awareness of a 1-2-3-4 struggle for order, which is accompanied by more than a little exhaustion. There is some general anxious dread because this poem is written in January of 2018, but it finds its deep wound in remembering and grieving the loss of poet and enthusiasm tornado Tomaž Šalamun, whom it was my great good fortune to cross paths with a few times while we both not always carefully strode the earth. Ultimately, I would like the poem to be an expression of the hope for personal utility in the face of mortal cognition.”

—Marc McKee