Bruce McRae
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Addressing the Dark
And now, the roaches’ carbolic sparkle. A mouse in your drawers. The spider spinning her dreamy yarn. Better a light to find you by, to see where they’ve hidden sleep, witness to the night-flower and black iris, our senses moving with little urgency in a mothy domain of muffled images-- so we may lie with the nocturnal. And as dark as you are there’s room for yet more darkness, the insubstantial a spilled ink, a reservoir of human fears and sentiment, enough space for fumbling, some stumbling, a bit of bumbling too, enough depth to drop a shoe-- but not enough time, never enough time for all other diffuse matters. The Dust Settles It’s after midnight in the wherewithal. Stars are swarming the autumnal pitch, Ursa Minor foraging the last of summer’s honeyjar, July an aftertaste, August in memoriam. Either very early or very late, the pop-eyed optimist lies baffled by time’s disregard. A village idiot suspended between otherwise and elsewhere, he’s lightheaded, woozy with sleepless vertigo, bearing a message which is no message. And this is his unpoem, his grog-muddled hypothesis. A comic sketch about a shooting star in love with a cow. A skit concerning a man being drawn and quartered. If you listen very closely you can hear him murmuring afar. He’s the one lip-synching in the celestial choir. That’s him waving a stick under any number of noses, attempting to catch the Unknowable One’s attention, oration’s underlord thoroughly lost among the multitudes. First light is crouching along the windowsill, our little laird fluttering his lids then nodding like a pup. Finally his dime is spent. There’s only another word more in his exceptionally long story. Bruce McRae, a Canadian musician, is a multiple Pushcart nominee with poems published in hundreds of magazines such as Poetry, Rattle and the North American Review. His books are The So-Called Sonnets (Silenced Press); An Unbecoming Fit Of Frenzy; (Cawing Crow Press) and Like As If (Pski’s Porch), Hearsay (The Poet’s Haven). |