Marc McKee
—
Commute to & from the Middle Distance
I only have a year in the middle distance.
The year is a gift. In the interest of efficiency
I tell the students There are several rules
and within the rules several more rules.
Partly this is because of the way mourning
gathers into a day. It turns from the place
where the fabric that is supposed to be
the world is gored, broken threads
curling shyly toward shade
like singed hairs. And then choices. This
is part of what I tell them.
From the middle distance, home focuses
into a series of different reliefs. Celebration too
turns from sun to night, its silk banners’ drape
softening any river’s bones, smoothing tears,
smoothing tears, even celebration
the charmed kin of mourning, oh
it’s morning again, deep in your coffee cups
or struggling out of 37 bathrobes
with roller skates on, trying make way
into a hastily sketched agenda. You do
and there is a tree to go through,
an office building, a pillar of smoke.
Are we on the other side of something yet?
Sure, I tell them. Soon we will be whistling
past the cemetery. Distance there
is a brick cloud, light a species of honey
we can’t lick all the way off our fingers.
In the attempt to say something true
I say There are many rules
but in the end you must make a sound
so beautiful that once
it has been made, people
or the more sensitive animals
or perhaps even parked cars, engines
not even cool cannot wait for it
to come back. How it hurts to wait
for the return of what you fear never will.
You walk past the library and the wind
does that thing to your hair
that makes you look forever
parachuted in. You walk back past
that library, at the center
of the middle distance, aching
for a particular home. A cluster of notes
welling up in you fletches
the arrow you try to become
the moment you come down the ramp
that leads to the interstate. Then the sign,
the sign’s scars promising you
you are already almost returned, a taste
suddenly like water, and you are a horse,
you are a horse in a desert.
Everybody With a Hungry Heart is Back In Town
It’s Spring again and again and again
each swiveled glance comes away
with a new wedge of molten light
launching itself like a swelling shoulder
at anything that looks like a portcullis,
like swinging saloon wings like seedy
motel doors in a procedural like rusty iron
or plush or sudsy foam it’s Spring
and the invisible once more catapults weeds
and thorns and glorious bells
of the most delicate paper
through winter’s busted rivets,
the crack in the bed wide enough
to send a river through and the river
that river’s never the same as
besides. Each bright-inclined color screams,
every limb of every reborn thing
has got its own case, its own retrial again
and again the cases squawk the way
you think ligaments and muscle would
while being torn through
by a serrated instrument only it is something
you didn’t know you were saying out loud
or something you were hearing
your accomplice not knowing they were saying
out loud it’s Spring again
just watch how everything leaves
until it seems that leaves
are everything, everything returning
but it’s not everything returning
it’s everything replaced it’s Spring
by which I mean it’s an aggressively
obvious metaphor for human people
I finally don’t know how
to turn away from. It’s Springsteen
again, a vested comet of burly vapor
either charging from the tree
or shook free from some hasty cairn
again it’s Springsteen or Lizzy
not just thin but thinning, thinning,
gone as you wait for a hamburger
at the place which has no chance
of making you any hamburger
you really want among such bumblebees
and flowers oh these little unstoppable puppies
sprung and laboring to recoil, back
in town then vanishing, again
Spring it is, your love has left you
you have left your love, your love’s
a left hook increasingly sticky with debris,
your child is a voice in your ear
this instant simultaneously impossibly
distant from you, a completely other life,
your musical icon has been cut down
too early, the axe in their own hands
now quiet, the scythe
entirely outside their influence
there is very little time
why waste it a shambles, a shambles
in the unshirking vinegar of ire, why vengeful
from a certain vantage there is almost
no time no time at all again
again a bolt of lightning is itself
a leave gets red as any medieval transaction
inside each a record of fire and drought
and rare, slaking water it’s a tree, slow
spaceship who, me? and a tree’s got
to reach a tree’s got to get out of here
Commute to & from the Middle Distance, Revisited
Brief gift—one year there in the middle
distance, going by the academic calendar.
Any gift, like most other human boons,
is part sacrifice. Many winters. In this year
there is a particular blizzard. I go
to and fro in the manner of one camping
where money is, then returning home
with it. In the evenings I stay between
a handle of bourbon and a 12 pack
of sparkling water. Beside a bed
meant to keep me from the floor.
When I leave this place I will leave
the bed for a young couple moving in.
The best produce in this middle distance
is at the Walmart. The handles they stock
are reasonably priced. When the sun shines
it is still grey. The particular blizzard
so swift I am already on the interstate
by the time I can tell that no exits
will open until I am almost returned.
I am uncertain whether a road
is what I’m driving over in the dark,
through swirling snow, until a semi roars
past and heaps an avalanche
onto my windshield. The wipers struggle.
I go back and forth. My nerves
are fastened to the unlikely anchor
of This American Life. The commute,
usually 90 minutes, creeps into
its fourth hour. But I will make it
to where I am going. My maneuvers
are equal to the moment. Back then,
I always made it home.
Marc McKee is the author of five collections of poetry, the most recent of which is Meta Meta Make-Belief (Black Lawrence, 2019). New work appears or is forthcoming from Pleiades, River Styx, Solid State, and swamp pink. He is the managing editor for the Missouri Review and lives in Columbia, Missouri with his son, Harry.
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