Author: Duncan MacNae

Where is the promised cure? What are its forms
Applications, usefulness, implications
Tea, salve, tincture, poultice
That charm you wear around your neck
Under your shirt, bury it at the crossroads
Wormwood in bitter old age
Alamo for the fever, the boil that rises in the night
Alegria, blood of the deer, loosen the child’s tongue,
Quiet the aging heart, Anil del muerto since
The modern age you find indigestible
And chair-bound
Sunflower of the dead man may help
Borage for courage, cachana
Charm away mal del ojo
And what is our post-post-modern
Predicament save lack of courage 
And the evil eye?
So many for stomach ache – chamisa, chimaja
Hinojo, poleo – cota to soothe you
Artemisia to sweat you – a small sip at a time. 
But what of the plague that stalks us, masks us, 
Isolates – what cure for the viral hate and disaffection
What remedio for the cancer inexorable in our breasts?
Inmortal and Osha and quiet prayer, and maybe
The rattlesnakes and the witches (unmasked without
Doubt) will keep their distance too.

Old church in ruins
Ancient walls building up anew
Holy river racing below
Yellow warbler
In silverlace vine from China
Elk tracks in the sandy bank
Take the shoes from off your feet

Holy hills ring the sky
Bowl open to the sky
Habitation of lizards 
Sanctuary of small birds
The white earth and the red
In harmony

Dusty tread for our recreation
We who do not own this
But belong to it, like the old ones
Said. 
Our querencia finds us watching
The rose-fingered dawn
Through alien trees
While the doves come for water

Passing stone-eyed in the wild ignorance
Frosted grey against hoar-frost white
Hooved plunderers, ruin of gardens
Destroyers of the flowers I plant for my love
Heedless in their browsing as the glass-eyed 
Teenagers at the corner market, valuing
Nothing except their own wild hunger, their
Self-contained oneness with the wide expanse
Of sagebrush, remorseless in their foraging
Experimental ravagers, they pass in silent
Ghostly troop, keepers of the world that was,
World that is coming,
Enforcers of entropy.

A devastation of diseases
A prolongation of plague
A congregation of coronaviruses
A coven of cancers 
A disassembly of side effects
A hopefulness of treatments
A supposition of herbs
A profitability of patients.

A few more days in this borrowed house
Within the sound of church bells
A few more days in this cradle of time
Beside the hopeful abused river
Brief time of accounting 
Before the new place is ours
That last place we dream of, dark ceilings
Fire undying on the hearth, walls filled 
With scenes of lost mountains
Disappeared querencias beside haunted rivers
Memories of owls sounding from the fir trees
Gardens of remembrance, the corn that reached the sky
But never yielded abundance
Great vista of sky, chasm of light
Mountains of rock and cloud
Snow covered peaks across the divide
Chasms of light, canyons of shadow 
Above dark trees
Distant views across ancient pueblos
Now covered with pinon and sunflowers
Arroyos filled with broken pots
Churches full of old bones
A new river, new city, new trees
Mountains of light unscalable
Music never ending , houses unalienable
Unalterable and unaging

This picture of icy mountains
Couloirs full of broken blocks
Aretes knife-edged at their sides
The deceptively easy-looking
Snowfields at the base, until 
You come to sheer rock and
Bergschrund
Inaccessible ledges run west
The only way to the top that
Misses the elephant’s trunk
Bulging from the eastern summit 
This painting of icy mountains
That I will never behold under the sky
Is as immediate to my soul as hospital
Gown, radioactive IV
Frosty white tunnel to come.

Surprised by flowers of a full spring day
Scablands grey, tall clouds passing through
Blue skies in procession, trailing dark
Blowing curtains, rays of sunlight
Fritillaria forgotten from last year’s seed catalog 
Nod checkered lilies over maple leaves
Amidst wind-flowers daffodils crocus.
But below
Where blue-eyed grass towers
Over microscopic lomatium unseen
Cream golden nemophila nestles
Amidst basalt slag, cryptobiotic forests, phlox.

Shouts of play all stilled from the schoolyard
This morning recess, but birdsong is loud
Wind stirs spring branches while the neighbors
Work on the annual float for the parade
That will never come this year
Fear on the mild breeze
Contagion in every face
Frustration leads the desperate astray
From love during pestilence, friendship
In the dark wood, phone calls like its
1975. Kyrie eleison ring the wind chimes
White-crowned sparrows at my feet.

Cacophonous Chinese plastic bagpipes
Surprisingly sweet Romanian fiddle
Pre-electric wind-up phonograph
Silver flute carrying old names
Box filled with wax symphonies
Golden boy’s mellow clarinet
Digital box remembering old songs

How to live during the plague:
Stay in your house
	(for how long?)
Until the cities be desolate, without
Inhabitant. . . 
	(Not so long, we pray)
Until watching The Office again seems 
More unbearable than the ventilator?
Until the time and times and a time
Have passed us by, the remnant?
The children kept from the sky
The grandmother kept from her busy acquisition
Grandfather fuming in frustrated illusion
This wasn’t the deal – there were 
Unlimited Ford Mustangs, manufactured houses, 
Hot Pockets, ammunition stores (keeping the neighbors
At bay amidst all the abundance?)
Scramble for toilet paper, limit
Consumption, milk down the drain, harvest
Rots in fields. 
The prison cell appears in essence – no distraction 
from the digital bars, no limit to boredom

Hold on until the cough comes (maybe
you already had it) Steer clear 
quack remedies pushed from 
high places, wear your mask though
the mask has slipped, lament the poor billionaire
stuck on his yacht, realize nurses as followers of
high calling, but with no protection, no respect, no
reprieve from infection, keep your chin up, 
your hair down, don’t forget to bathe, eat
but not too much, lay off the booze, move
in a haze, enjoy the sunshine, free time, paint
pictures, sing a song, write a poem, remember
days gone by, remember there are days to come,
new countryside at the end of the tunnel, 
structures of dual power, possibility of 
fresh air, put away your skull mask (put
one on Posada!) wear a human face, keep
a human heart, free the chained bird that
flutters at your soul center, ponder querencia, 
trace out faded figures, restore garbled words,
Stack up stones of love.

Yesterday a three season day
Rain, sun and wind, snow still lingering
In the morning still with frost. Birds
Gather seeds on this second day of  our
Feeder watch. 
One more day of radiation and attempted
Poison before that other poison called waiting.
The insurance company will protest that I am too far
Gone. Not worth the expense and bother. 
The doctor puts it in more soothing terms.
My mind rebels still at the notion that there
Is no cure, only prolonging of life – mere semantics.
There truly is no cure for the thing that chases us
From birth down halls and forests of life. There is 
Only this last frost-rimed morning of winter
Filled with diamond-dust snow and the 
Singing of the miraculous little birds.

I. 
Take no thought for tomorrow - 
No more radical words for our progress-obsessed system
Don't think about tomorrow
Precludes stock options, house payments, cruise vacations
Super Bowl fantasies - in short the whole 
tackle and trim of pre-apocalyptic consumerist normalcy.
Take care of today is corollary
Perfectly suited to quarantine and prayer
Be here now we are instructed over and over
down through millenia, live for the day,
Tomorrow never comes. 

And so I want to ask, I want to ask
How long? How long until that 
Dawn with no tomorrow
Long night of no sunrise
Short coursing of the sun
At the end of the race?

When the blue birds come back forever
When the snow is finally gone
The rain blowing in from the south
When we all sit at the table
No longer contending over shadows,
Disputing the flickering histories of our cavern wall.

But that is not tomorrow
Instead, a sort of no-tomorrow.
Not worrisome, an easy burden, 
Consummation waited for since the beginning
beginning of whatever this is
whatever will be, world without end
healing waters from the great river,
the healing trees, music unending

And so without a thought for the mundane tomorrow
Daily chores, bills, work, status-seeking, gossip,
unperformed house repairs and unwritten poems
I ask again
How long?

II.
And so we buried Violet, honorary duchess
Our angora rabbit, under shroud and stone
Covered with tulips and strawflowers 
Her foot of ground, said a prayer for her sweet spirit
As we stood and spent a few tears.
And what was that solemn ceremony?
Where do the spirits of animals go, and why are we so 
Sure their fate is so different than ours?
Buried in her garden among sage and calendula
Where she made her lippety rounds 
weighed down with basalt stone and blossoms.
Or Ajax, leg-destroying hero dog for whom I spent
Hard labor building his cairn of milky quartz stone
Among the farewell-to-spring and poppies of a 
fire-singed green California hillside?
No such hero’s grave will I get in this refined age,
No shrine of river rock hauled to hilltop,
No shroud of old bedsheet, or should I just 
vanish like an old cat.
We all go our way, in our time, God send angels 
To guide us, but no word has come back from that
Far shore, except from He who told us he conquered 
Death, and promised resurrection, but He left again 
After a few days and hasn’t been seen since, and seldom
Heard from.

III.
Yesterday, May Day, wave the red flag, dance around the May pole,
Light the two fires to drive the cattle between, but we all huddle
Separated in our houses across nations and continents, while the
Charlatans still preach that there are more important things than 
Being alive – presumably pork chops airline revenue hotel vacancy rates
Fat women in Michigan getting hair colored and nails painted red white blue 
To which I can only say that there are more important things than dying - 
Though it comes for us all, no privilege, but rather a reckoning – 
Bird song, love, breathing the mountains again, swimming in the emerald sea,
A boy playing clarinet, gardens to come, smell of roasting chiles, winter’s chill.
Why climb this mountain holding death in our heart, why hazard the climb, 
And then turn back from the summit – life is the basic premise
Death the dollar flash and trim. Court life even as it flees. Hold in your heart hope of resurrection, cherish that consummation of life forever, but know that we humans cling to this vail of shadow as our natural habitat, 
shaped for its beauties and its terrors. 

IV.
Scenes from a childhood come unbidden to mind
Disjointed, carrying little apparent weight or meaning – 
A Christmas gathering at the Perkins (whoever they might
Have been or still be) where I had real mincemeat pie, 
Tiny concrete block church where an honest to God old Irishman 
Sang me a song about his name and about crocodiles on the Nile,
Tremendous water-oak in front of a house, long gone, where I 
found strange insects, sun coming up over far hills, spring days, 
exulting survival of night.
Now for me days of doctor consultation
Analyzing the recent scans, interpreting the electron clusters
Captured on screen, looking for other invaders, metastases 
(may no new thing arise) taste of fear coming again with the 
Five o’clock blues and with the morning cough – metallic and 
bitter as you may guess.

Sulaire, at last I see you 
Meteor falling into this sea
Of polished bronze
Fiery sea still holding fisherman’s bones, 
concealing proscribed priests, pirate secrets
I watch from the megalithic tomb
At Cleggan Farm, its great wedge capstone
Pointing like a ship’s prow
Toward western lands
Gorse glowing burning golden, 
Sheep content with the turf on their marshy hillside
Sun sinking while you rise
And plummet, rise
And fall again
Inishbofin’s hills like white cattle
Floating hazy, heavy
On the darkening horizon
While you wing your way
Fish-filled to your cliffy fortress.
Sulaire, sea comet, I see you at last.