Shane McCrae – Three Poems

Shane McCrae

Three Poems

Threshold

1. Goodbye! I am penetrating the buttonhole at my collar, and the front door is as open and full of light as a CAT scanner. When I close my eyes, there is something wrong with my mind. It’s not that I’m impatient. If anything, I’m mispatient. I can wait for years for the wrong thing to happen, as evidenced by the sports wagon. An idea can’t forgive itself, and at the end of a long day, one begins to feel one has no choice. If the stars come out at all, they come out on the other side of the roof. I am drawing up plans to build a house there, goodbye. The lumber yard has no mother and no wife. My entire suit is a clip-on. It’s not that I don’t love you. 2. You will forgive me for talking about myself with the same words I use to talk about you? such as: Our marriage isn’t working; such as: You have [beautiful] hair. 3. Goodbye! I have tripped over my shoelaces in my haste to be productive, and now a coyote is licking my ear. I was born in a country to which such animals had not yet been imported. I am nervous in equal measures, as a consequence of my classical training and difficult adolescence. It’s not that I’m depressed. I have good teeth, though it’s hard to be comfortable with the tongue of an animal, even a friendly animal, in one’s ear. I can imagine myself in a better house, and I wonder, is that the reason the world will not leave me alone? For whenever I consider my loneliness, say, really I am thinking about longing, which is more like loneliness in a hang glider than loneliness by itself. A coyote is licking my ear. He has a large mouth and dentures shaped like a dog’s teeth. 4. We are roused by bugles together to decorate the Beaux Arts department store, though the bugles themselves are decorative. Is it safer to say one of us is roused and the other afraid to seem foolish? though neither of us knows which is which. I regret that our weekends are not clearer. 5. Goodbye! I am sopping up the pool of whatever it was I now refuse to talk about, and soon I will be on my way. My shirt, I have discovered, is brittle, though praised fulsomely in the washing instructions. Needless to say, I do not wash it, but may I just say this? Divorce, like marriage, is a failure of the imagination, goodbye. I am crying my balls off. Poem About a Car Made of Words Blood came from places blood wasn’t supposed to come from. Lower, beneath the snow-toupeed branches, erasing themselves all the way up. He stood to clean the bench about which he’d had ideas, for which he was now suffering. A fixture was applied, like a scar with a zipper. A Short Note Explaining the Long Wait I’ve put your name on a list of possible donors. Now, the fun part’s guessing which piece I’ve volunteered. We are not forgiving animals, like mice, who will allow themselves to terrify the same elephant again and again, though we were the animals who drew that cartoon in the first place, we were the animals who shocked the elephant into submission with enormous, mouse-shaped tasers. The world is a friendly or unfriendly place, depending on what you are willing to die for. Yesterday, I spent six hours calculating your hat size, and another six resigning myself to a bag of headbands. You still run, don’t you? Oh, you are so obvious I could cry. Come back home, lover. Pour hot wax in my eyes.

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