ANDREW
MCCARRON
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Andrew McCarron’s
poems are a marvelous mixture of the archaic and the cutting-edge, the stately
and the casual. Sometimes they have a memoiristic quality—“Someone else fastened a belt
around/Me and took me where I did not wish to/Go—but
then they suddenly turn into a fable or dream.
They entertain the fabulous and strange—“I wore a sequin vest to the
introduction”—only to deflate it—“Okay, look/My vest
wasn’t really a vest, nor was/The introduction worth writing home about.” McCarron is tempted
by the promise of the romantic, but always remains clear-eyed enough to put it
in doubt:
We are fed on the
idea:
One morning soon
we’ll walk
Into
summer-cloud-charged air
And feel the ballooning
sensation
Of a June
kiss. What’s harder
To predict is when
or if any
Of this will come
to pass.
The poems maintain a steady forward
momentum and tension, yet the diction is relaxed. The language moves back and forth between the
formal and the ragged, resulting in a poetry down to
earth and at the same time maddeningly elusive.
“Either way, out steps the future.”
--John
Koethe
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THE DAYS BETWEEN
Someone
else fastened a belt around
Me
and took me where I did not wish to
Go.
I was once a tike in a toadstool forest.
Womb-dropped
into needles, I hoofed
Through the brush like deer.
If demons
Crouched
near, I misconstrued them.
Also,
I swam at Bish-Bash, and rushed
Beneath Augusts of scattered cirrus.
Notions
of travel were wedged into
The
fold come September, which led
To
proclamations of uncertain shit once
November
came. Still, I never forgot you.
IN ANOTHER DREAM
In
another dream, Joe Mudd was Isidor
(and I, Florensky). We trudged through Russian
snows up a mountain to a Hermitage. The snowstorm
swirled in circles. In darkness we reached the hovel with difficulty (through
the snow banks). We received communion amid the blue embers of incense and
fragrant candles of amber-yellow wax. “Relax,” the smoke curled, “Each gesture
shall crumble toward our impossible. We’ll watch the river. We’ll complain of
cramps. We’ll recover and scamper Upstate. We’ll sleep the nights with hands
aglow to touch the morning goat.”
SPERM WHALES
O,
to have a wheat dream; to reap
Wheat
beneath a harvest moon is more
Than
one might expect from aquatic
Life. It seems our visions perpetually
Flip
themselves nautically. Can’t you see?
The
more one lives the more one’s sand
Gives
into the heart’s propensity to feel
A
heartbreaking undertow; harvests of
Pumpkin
and wheat tumble out of reach.
Instead,
we’ll see too many seagulls.
We
stand on the salty sandbars, tossing
Fluke to the pelicans of amnesty.
Nevertheless
(as if rounds of altruism
might lead to higher ground) we return
Waterlogged. Every ocean felt is the
Same:
sperm whales thundering through
A
blue as land-less as it is ubiquitous.
–What
else is there to do but spawn?
FREQUENT PREGNANCIES
… and then the yearning to be
Who
one is, though hasn’t yet become
Rises
into applause from an audience
That
hasn’t gathered, though is expected
In
a spring meadow that might open in the way
Meadows
Open.
Golden
and pale, we’ll undo
Ourselves from past cattails and crows. One dusk
Will slip over another’s cusp.
Each mother’s sun-cover
Rips. Cloud roosters will break into
subsequent
Chicks. We’ll be free. The red sky, the
assembly
Of
roadside corn: harbingers of earlier
Attempts.
GARDENING IN JANUARY
I wore a sequin vest to the introduction;
The
audience that gathered was huge
Like the Meadowlands around evenfall
(those stalks all orange tongues of fire,
those
My
vest wasn’t really a vest, nor was
The introduction worth writing home about.
All
that gathered was some sullied wheat
And the sound-suck of roaring jets.
I
longed for cornstalks and pussywillows.
It’s hard to know what to plant, or how
To
be the composer who transposes
Scores into the genius of a new key–
Standing
salubrious amidst attrition
Able to say, “This… this is our
Condition.” Be here now–with this–
The suns pass (nighttimes will the same)
Regardless
of what vest once surmised
Would husk upon the future corn.
THE FUNCTION OF DREAMS
We
are fed on the idea:
One
morning soon we’ll walk
Into
summer-cloud-charged air
And
feel the ballooning sensation
Of
a June kiss. What’s harder
To
predict is when or if any
Of
this will come to pass.
We’re
half-guilty of delusion:
Seeing
one thing as another,
Visions
of perennial flourish,
Sudden
lifts into self-proclaimed
Genius:
dreaming into barren fields
Melons
of ridiculous girth; homes
Enveloped in hickory smoke.
But
for what it’s worth,
It’s
been going on for a while:
These
half-turns into what is or
Isn’t
happening: i.e. a chickadee,
Or
some chickadee-like bird sings
In the alleyway. Or is that dreamt?
Either
way, out steps the future.
THE ENTRANCE
Our
entrance into the scar came after
Penance
for who came before (she
increased beneath the thorny branch).
Our
entrance into the scar came after
Being
wrenched from the lilac-spree
(some defeats outlive the fallen leaf).
Our
recovery tagged the swell,
Which fell like the cicada-call once fall
Frosted the early-September meadow.
Everywhere
I go I hear them sing. In
The
August rains and November ruins,
Your sound of impalpable blossoms ring.
NEW MACHINES
More
Machines than
Deception
than thrushes through my
Ear. I rushed through
yesterday to construct
Here,
hoping to return, which I didn’t,
Hence the wooly mood. Soon, the vines will
burst, and a hearse, somewhere on a road,
will
Pass.
The bees, burdened with pollen, will
Descend
upon the toadstools I manufactured.
I
like they manufacture metal honeycomb
Beneath the expanding air.
Some
philistines’ll say this shan’t be
The
key… that I borrow difficulty,
But
the topography of deficiency
Provides
a further incentive to
Repair
what soon might disintegrate
(if we build too late). Each new
Machine
may seem impossible,
But
that won’t keep me from gathering
Cogs
like a Polish woman gathering
Mushrooms
or blueberries in the wood
Back
into which what’s ever the same fix?