Six poems from «Sad Animal» (POESIA) ~ di Joshua McKinney - TeclaXXI
POESIA
Joshua McKinney
Six poems from Sad
Animal
Anniversary
I sit
facing my father, naked
in his
new suit. His hands rest on his knees, fingers
slick
with birthblood. If he moves,
his
wicker chair creaks
like an
exhausted barn, his white hair flares
like
the first word of a struck match.
My
father sits facing me, young
in my
new suit, my dark hair orphaned to rage.
My
hands are black with grave dirt.
Each of
us has something to say.
As
schooled, I look him in the eyes
where
two mules pull a plow through snow.
He
stands up, young and handsome
in his
blue suit, his hair
dark as
barn smoke. Papa, he says.
My
wicker chair creaks.
My
white hair flares like the first word
of a
struck match, which is also its last.
March
Under mud and brittle leaves,
in a month named for war,
the throes of spring begin,
ecstatic and adorned for war.
Behold the hordes stumbling
in cracked earth, clutching
their children, torn, numb.
They will be blamed for war.
Of the estimated 500
million
firearms worldwide, 100
million
belong to the Kalashnikov family,
a family famed for war.
Behold the desperate vessel
tossed at sea, the tiny body
on the beach. For what
are we thus shamed? For war?
The nominee presumed
to know the people’s needs.
In fact, he understood their fear.
So he campaigned for war.
Consider the irony
in the nomenclature of genocide:
Apache, Kiowa, Chinook, Tomahawk.
We use these names for war.
In Belgium, 1915, poppies
dotted the shattered fields.
In Kandahar, 2016—a sea
of poppies farmed for war.
The slogan reads Our Children,
Our Future. But the displaced
children cannot read—
an entire generation claimed for war.
The ex-soldier cannot sleep.
He is afraid of crowds, loud noises,
even trash. Is this what it means
to be trained for war?
Does anyone care that a short-
tailed bandicoot rat went extinct
when the Mesopotamian Marshes
were drained for war?
The ancient Romans extolled
the virtues of spring, a time
when earth, and so men’s hearts,
grew warm for war.
Even I, Kafir, nonbeliever
that I am, can see the coming
of a time when all months
shall be renamed for war.
American Idiom
When I
was a boy and playground squabbles grew
too
heated, our last resort was to evoke
the
power of our fathers and to boast,
“My dad
can whip your dad.” If it wasn’t true,
it
hardly mattered because somehow, we knew,
or
couldn’t know, that men would never come to blows
over
what we said behind the jungle gym. We spoke
freely,
not knowing that our tongues could do
far
more than fists. There was a brutal fluency
that we
absorbed at home, immersed in words
condensed
to violent metaphors; they colored
speech
with the hue of our community.
In time
we’d learn to wield a lexicon of slurs,
and
thus, to love our kind, united in identity.
Why I Sleep in My Best Suit
Because
if I wake up, I am
already
dressed. Call it
efficiency,
this refusal to fritter
a day
with unnecessary
dressing,
which act, completed
at
morn, must then at eve
be
undone. Because
as my
granny used to say,
what
starts as a jaunt
to the
market for eggs might
end
with you splayed and
broken
in the street. Ergo:
make
sure you have clean
undies
on. Because each night,
when I
take the train to search
for
you, the somber porter with
the
pointy teeth allows me
to ride
for free. Because
your
time zone is invisible.
Because
when the coyotes
wake me
with their collect calls
and I
run into the desert and
hold
the cactus flower to my
ear, I
think I can hear you
smiling
behind the frigid
frequency
of crickets.
Because
it forces me to fight
wrinkles,
lying on my back,
hands
crossed at the spot
where
the heart’s wicket was
kicked
in. Because that dark
blue
pinstripe stands out
amid
the ice floes on a king-
size
sea. Because eventually,
I will
be handed an instrument
of
uncertain use. Because
it’s
warm.
In
Perpetuum
As he
burned he never moved a muscle, never uttered a sound, his outward composure
in
sharp contrast to the wailing people around him. – David Halberstam
Some
images enter the eye and remain,
as if
carved in an arc of the skull’s dome, or folded
in some
furrow of the brain. Like the pyre
of
Thích Quảng Đức, whose indelible form
I’ve
retained for more than fifty years,
those
placid features holding my child-eyes
still,
as frozen amid tongues of corybantic flame
he sits
silent and unmoving, save for
the
raging action of his stillness. The living
heat
arrested as, leaping, it seizes him, appears
also to
emanate from the monk as if some long
restraint
has
given way, the flames bursting forth and
absconding
skyward with the coiling smoke.
Thus
the stunned aperture captures a world
in
black and white, no color and all color,
the
timeless past before us both reflected
and
absorbed. And now, in vivid hues, one tower explodes,
as its
twin spews forth a poisonous woad that
inscribes
the air with death not fated or deserved
and
leads the heart down paths of grim foreboding.
Nearby,
the second plane looms in perpetuum.
I close
my eyes and the walls of that cave where
the
mind hides are scripted over with pictures
flickering
in the glow of the sole, devouring
constant,
a splendid violence without restraint.
One
conflagration’s self-sacrifice is another’s
suicide,
each bedight in its own fierce light,
each
gasping a last breath to waft its own sad
anthem
of ash. I close my eyes and witness.
I bow
to the radiant horror of the martyr, all
those
beautiful humans with their flesh on fire.
Allure
A hawk
sits hidden,
conspicuously and
most high
upon
a lamp post,
red-shouldered
as with blood
bedight.
In the day’s
exhausted
light,
its swivel-headed, arrow-
keen
and earthward gaze
surveys
the evening
gold
grown over the rush
hour crush of
cars, where
locked
in traffic, I break,
creep forward,
break,
until—some
nameless
progress
fulfilled—I pass
at
last, useless and low,
beneath
that huge disdain
and
feel some puling
part of me flushed
forth
from
the sheltering
roadside
ditchgrass, skeltering
and
blind, to be
seized in the
talons
of
that terrible sight.
Inviolable
good has drawn
my
busted eyes into
the mirror of my
passing,
where
plume-sheen
dazzles
in last-light,
and
my ravening,
parched heart
leaps
into the air.
[The poems are taken from Joshua
McKinney’s Sad Animal, Gunpowder Press, 2024, 96 pp., winner of
the John Ridland Poetry Prize.]
_____________________________
JOSHUA McKINNEY
Dirige insieme a Tim Kahl la rivista digitale di ecopoesia: Clade Song: https://cladesong.com
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