Author: Duncan MacNae

Rain at last, in the night.
Waking to the drip of water from eaves
Hopeful as the doctor’s good report
Yesterday
Not all sufficing, but a brief spell
Of mercy, mercifully leading on 
To other mercies, waking dream seeds,
Forgotten sunflowers, poppies of promise,
Causing runner grass of concern to spread
And grow even faster, painting the horizon
Misty gray – no more clearly perceived
Void of sky, but rather shifting possibilities,
Potentials, buried promises spring up,
Slow steady drip of life.

Twenty years have passed in one
And I leaning on my hoe, breathless
Watering the winter-dry compost heap
While my darlings do the work
Sixteen penny nail in my ribs and back
But we get it done, this last garden clearing
Though we do not know that now
Assassination of cutworms
Purging of runner grass
Planting the first hopeful peas and
Carrots
Rotten old sunflowers removed,
Ruins of cornstalks hauled to the burning
Changing of the world, blooming of the weak
Assumption of strength, surrender of pride
Survival of gardens.

Silvery blossom half-dreams
Of a raw grey half dawn
The horses eat the flowers 
Ringing like little church bells

Ringing out our old world, ringing
In something new, in the half dream
Quiet of the house on a morning 
Of recurrent dreams, waking visions

Half remembered wishes, drowning worries
Travel through the plague, settle in a new place
New work for an old man, that paltry thing
Unless I sing, but the song is full of dreams
And vague imaginings. 

Mouth of the night, jaws of the morning
Whirlpool of evening after the deep 
Hole of five o’clock afternoon blues
The abyss is not empty, teems with half-visioned
Apparitions, voices long departed, streaks
Shadow grey across the sun’s mowed field
No taste of summer fruit, why no taste of fruit
Where is the music sounding, jostling dance
Warm embrace, and if so, if then, 
What is the change we pass through 
Or is it into oblivion we come at last
Through the mouth of the night?

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.