Two Poems
by Michael P. McManus
Approaching Fifty
To proffer the X factor of age means time is endless
in the scatological, aside from the Suburbs,
where a tie-dyed euphoria harbors the invisible dregs.
Last night I saw Sophocles in drag, his mind mired in myth,
this morning the muscled popcorn maker.
Is it illusion? Imagine that John is not dead.
The day after I hid behind Finnegan's wreck,
as a court-appointed attorney tried to find me
near the abandoned appliances. She was wrong
to think that I was not old enough to drink.
I knew nothing back then but Urias vacationing
in a seaside town. That hangover keeps returning in waves.
It still hurts to translate for it is prayer
that failed to bring forgiveness to the penitent.
Look at me, caught up in Holy Hallelujah,
bits of koans, the sootfall of remembered lovers.
Look at me, drunk on William Duffy's farm,
pondering Brangelina, the media elite. Two ponies
cross the open meadow to move closer to me.
They know a good poem when they hear one.
Meditatation at Hoaglands Run
Along its banks the cold, reptilian stream
is lined with snow where flowers used to grow.
A little further out in deeper runs,
the amber colored flash where whitecaps leap
above the stony fix of sunken rocks,
flash by so fast like all my summers past.
The sense of self from years ago is gone.
The shrunken child will rise no more at dawn
to chase the day away through fallen leaves.
In mortal death we are immortal once.
The eyes that keep a man awake at night
are furthest from the light when morning comes.
Still, here I see the shape of limbs in trees,
the tapered way the highest branches bend,
when death is reaching for, but fails to catch
a rising riot of red-winged blackbirds.
How can they fly so close yet never touch?
Against the sky they form a single wing,
it flies from what is truest in the earth,
where life demands that men must live as thieves;
that they must steal each moment for themselves;
a place where hope is hell inside a breeze,
that blows away the promises they made.
What changes touch the monuments we make,
the fables bought and sold from door to door,
the whores who claim there was a virgin birth?
A proper edifice is proper ice—
It's winter now, a cold becoming calm
is how I see my property from here,
a few dark buildings, neglected but warm,
twin silos which will no longer ferment
the green, pressed crops. All harvest has ended.
The bloated, broken sacrificial lamb
is freed until it turns to look at me
in a blighted holy Hallelujah.
Do I resemble any kind of man
who stays oblivious to the grave that waits,
whether we love or hate, or soon slaughter
the sow, and leave its blood on the roadside
margins where people pass in light-filled cars?
There they go, the discarded selves, saplings
as pliant as a single fist of souls
on a boxer who keeps punching the night,
until we see the stars come sprinkling down.
I want to hear the syncopated thrum
they make and feel the morning after rush.
It is not over yet. I want to watch.
I'll place myself inside the burning chair
to feel the flames that dance around my feet,
and climb the equal legs of wood and flesh.
Michael P. McManus is the recipient of an Artist Fellowship Award from the Louisiana Division of the Arts for poetry. His poems have appeared in many places like Texas Review, Prism International, Adirondack Review,, Rattle, ONTHEBUS, Midwest Quarterly, Atlanta Review, Raintown Review, Soundings East, and Louisiana Literature. He has also received the Virginia Award from The Lyric and The Ocean's Prize from Sulphur River Literary Review.His short stories and flash fiction have appeared in numerous journals including; 3:AM, Lichen, The Pennsylvania Review, Pittsburgh Quarterly, Underground Voices, Dublin Quarterly, Louisiana Literature, Night Train, and Contrary Magazine. He has a short story forthcoming in Ashe.