November Light, 2023
Always but imperceptible
By living eyes the light from things
Events at any distance inches
Even the light from things events
Because it has to travel you
See the event thing after it
Happens a living person sees
It not to say the dead would see
Anything quicker see the instant
It happens not to say the dead
See things events without the aid
Of light but we the living see
After on Earth an interval
Too brief to notice things events
On Earth some stars are dead of course
And how would anybody notice
Perceive the event thing happening
Before they see it happening
The looked-at thing event not touch
The signals have to travel not
Sound sound is so much slower children
Do math between the flash and crack
Of the same bolt not smell no smells
Are slow as air unless the corpse
Is hidden in the walls unless
The corpse is hidden in the bushes
But maybe if the corpse is hidden
In light itself behind a screen
The air the living person breathed
Will take ten thousand lives to reach you
Blank Verse Sonnet on Purity
America your blood is poisoned Lord
Help you it’s poisoned and no God can help you
America nah what you need is bleach
I read it in a headline bleach and sunlight
Back when the president was president
America just open up a vein
A big one let the sunlight in the bleach
I bet it’s gotta feel like when you’re hot
So hot you see a bottle of cold water
And it looks good and when you drink it you
Can feel that coldness falling to your belly
America I bet that’s how it feels
To clean your blood to make your insides white
Except the cold is everywhere forever
To Who Sweeps the Floor, to Who Flattens the Heap
My soles were cut from something big
And flat a fusion of old waste
That by the cutting was made new
A heap of new now interlaced
The sheared-off parts of useful bodies
By gravity and circumstance
That had once been not parts but wholly
Bodies will dance their final dance
Across the floor to after-music
The hush-hush song of the big broom
Who sweeps the severed body parts
Away gets paid to clean the room
And pile the heap and someone else
Flattens the heaped-up parts together
Please let my soul and body not
Be buried in the same forever
______________
Shane McCrae’s most recent books of poetry, both published by Corsair, are The Many Hundreds of the Scent, and Cain Named the Animal, a finalist for the Forward Prize. He lives in New York City and teaches at Columbia University.
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