SOLO
What’s the first thing you do
in a house you suspect is haunted?
You sing. Singing somehow
gives you a protective refrain.
Look back over old family films
of your early candled birthdays,
who is always singing loudest?
The grand generations, now dead.
They sang as you grew up, each
year you gained height, weight
while every birthday for them
was just a diminishing return.
It ends with you singing alone
in a house on your birthday –
they are present, as always
yet you sing to ward them away.
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RICHIE McCAFFERY (b.1986) is a PhD Carnegie scholar at the University of Glasgow, researching the Scottish poets of World War Two. His poems have appeared in journals such as The Dark Horse, Magma, The Rialto and Stand as well as the anthologies Spinning Plates and Salt’s Best British Poetry 2012. His first pamphlet collection, entitled Spinning Plates, was published by HappenStance Press in March 2012.
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Read more work by Richie McCaffery:
Poem in B O D Y
HappenStance
Salt Publishing
Magma Poetry
The door always used to swing shut, by itself, for years and years, with measured haste. / Now it stands utterly still.
You tell yourself you’re immune, always, but then D appears, if not exactly out of the shadows then like a river of milk flooding the kitchen.
Water cress. Watercress. From the cognate in Middle Low German and Dutch. Waterkers. Pliny the Elder, in his History of the World—why aren’t there more books of this name—describes its roots as “effectual,” or so says the O.E.D.
it signifies some terrible and unwanted part of myself has been skillfully excised and that now it rushes off, most likely to be run over by a fully loaded tractor-trailer, screeching...
How hard the mountain tries to become the wind. How hard the wind tries to become a flame. How hard the flame tries to become a mountain. And the mountain, how it pretends not to notice the moon’s secret moves, what a torn moon rising from its mirror.
I’m not saying we both wake to a darkness and go to bed each night knowing we’ll wake to the same darkness the next day. I’m not saying that.
Land stretches, lush and flooding, and a man rows a boat across a field into the night.
Ought to put you over my knee. That tough love you never got from your damn fool daddy.
I must have. Stolen cash from my boss. Torn the legs off a cat. Sworn at the Afro’d server who put pickles in my sandwich. How else explain my son. Who walks with a cane.
Somebody is up there, somewhere, looking down at us, also seeing us in pieces. We are like shadows passing among the roots of the trees. When we reach the other side, the world has changed.
