Of Two Minds
The man who mistook a spider’s web for a galaxy.
Who thought his shirt buttons were Saturn’s moons.
Who swore his mirror was a window God looked in,
always in two places and of two minds.
He chased his shadow, running ahead of himself.
He spoke to the birds, and the birds spoke back,
unimaginable secrets, unattainable knowledge,
his shopping list a Shakespearian sonnet,
his slipper a cat, his dog a pillow.
Flags fluttering were monogramed handkerchiefs.
The road into town was a rain-fed river.
There he was, mostly, a man beside himself.
Who supposed the impossible, always the optimist.
Who told us the sun would come up tomorrow,
and we believed in him, and we were happy.
Heavy Water
Nautical twilight, darkness and her seven sisters
pulling their veils across the face of the Earth, the loam and glom
of the Earth, this world careening above the underworld,
this writer sleepy-eyed and bed-headed, eavesdropping on the ineffable,
a scrum of local night-angels heard muttering, but one voice overall.
A voice dusky with time, a voice made of old smoke and tears,
moss-muffled and yet true as a bell, buoy-urgent and miles away.
How the lost must sound on the seas of insistence
Spindrift
Amorphous dream-shapes. Or a Luftwaffe of butterflies?
Tenuous sleep patterns appearing and disappearing. Or legions in the mist?
There’s not much to go by when the world rolls over on its other side.
Silence begets silence. A blink is mistaken for a naughty wink.
Continents bump together, but there’s no paper to write upon.
No pencil to hold dear. No poetry without reason.
To put it another way, I need to put it another way,
love’s delicate eggshell the colour of Mayan turquoise,
a likened bird in the foliage, a feather to tickle the nose of the dumb.
Love is, and love isn’t. Like mind-state or the theory of nationhood.
Compare that quarter moon rising now – I can see it
only in part. Its colours are a made pretense. It is a reflection
of something greater. It hauls us together. It moves us apart.
Yes, that’s what I hear: a quiet commotion and grass report;
the heart loosening its tether; joy’s kite taken up with the wind.
As sure as the present moment lies between night and dawn,
I shall gather in affection’s spindrift and driftwood and tidal shove.
I shall drown within the absence of water.
Meat And Mayhem
Post solstice and summer’s new light, its spectral slant
returned from the global tilt of the southern pole.
Summer, the high time for sun and birdsong and lush shrubbery,
when the deer come down to walk among us, mute and beautiful,
simple beyond any human regard, like souls of stolen children
returned for a last and longing look around, to be in the company of mortals,
a furtive shadow occupying flesh, to be once more, in the meat and mayhem,
to live among the cogs and hazards, to be the water that turns the wheel –
and not that thing joined with the earth, asleep under the willows.
Bruce McRae, a Canadian musician and multiple Pushcart nominee, has had work appear in hundreds of publications around the world. The winner of the 2020 Libretto Chapbook Prize (20 Sonnets), his books include ‘The So-Called Sonnets’; ‘An Unbecoming Fit Of Frenzy’; ‘Like As If’; ‘All Right Already’ and ‘Hearsay’
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