Kevin McIlvoy

Cairn

Alone at river crossings I privately ask
that I may start my life from scratch.
I’m grateful no one can hear
my voice sounding any different than
the murmuring surface carrying
brisk shadows of branches and
birds downstream, sun-stunned clouds
that have been
              glimmering there.
              That’s the scream of a hawk,
I told my two boys. That’s the cry
of prey. The tearing of meat. 
Here — two last sticks of gum. Make 
them last. Sweet! — am I right?
With smaller steps, we’ll stumble
less. (We could cut our lawn by
walking through with all those
burs on our
               shoes and socks.)
In your hair is pollen enough for
two pollen-bombs. Don’t set them off
by singing the wrong rock song. Let’s
not clean our glasses while the air is
so golden. Squint to see if your                                                                                 
eyes change your questions. Look — on 
the back of your own hands:
you’re turning to dusk.
                            (Only joking!)
Try one more cast before we go.
This I guess is not the time or place for
us. Wasps live here! The kind in the petroglyphs.
Leave wasps alone. They build in rain – they’ll
mistake us for storms. We’ll make a cairn at
this crossing, so next time we
can see how the river took it down
or shook the stones but
                           let them stand.
And anyway, snakes live here. Snakes!
Some people say they come in groups of six
and eight as a matter of habit. Some say,
“That’s bullshit!” (Don’t say “bullshit,” okay?)
And, see, they make a raking shape in
the leaf-ghee mud whenever they
return to this bank where their young
                  were born and were borne away.

Around my bed America was falling  
                               
  Thank you for the four years I have been owned by The White Noise Machine which has helped me sleep in oblivion. I couldn’t have known the sleep a natural-born American man can find who each night listens with calming satisfaction to the sounds in the noise, to the pleas and the cries. I couldn’t have known that overwhelmed by human misery I could crash so far down into dream, a full-sail man blown at amazing acceleration—beautiful, so beautiful—past the youngest of the children taken from their families, given no information, shown no path home, thrown as pawns into pens, their stories, their stories, their living stories  buried in mass graves almost pandemic-vast. I feel so blessed to have this winning White Noise Machine, a no-hoax cast of compost orange, dialing me in, protecting me from exhausting consciousness, from sleep-destroying impulses of wide-awake conscience. During this nightly terror briefing I can be lowered, my field of stripes and stars shaken, straightened, folded thirteen times, can sleep just fine tucked into my locked display case, and not have to be a human tossing and turning, trying to know his own loving-learning mind. I like every single setting: Pray Them Dead Lock Them Up Wall Them Out Steal Their Vote Merika Mine Merika More Mine Merika All Mine. O, My Greatagain Merika! This is the most patriotic wreath you will ever sleep beneath!

Gravitationally Completely Collapsed Objects, as Observed from A Circumstellar Accretion Disk                                                                   

At
last
in
a
triumph
of
botany
there
is
a
black
rose
named
Baudelaire

&
a
black
tulip
named
Cup-a-joe

&
a
morning
glory
named
Grimm
resembling
a
black
hole.

Humankind
is
not
done
blackening

&
isn’t
that
a
lesson
we
should
learn
from
when
we
are
naming

children
hurricanes
pet
fish
new
parks
song-based
foods
bomb-kits
cookbooks
twitter
poems
grazing
stars
dinner
plates
extinct
insects
aging
brains?

It
seems
we
are
not
done
with
this
alarmazing
task.                                                                            

Black
bamboo
made
blacker
is
named
Abyss

&
miniature
poinsettia
named
Little
Bleak

&
fruiting
cactus
named
Desolada.

Nonbotanists
have
gotten
in
on
the
act
have
invented
Vantablack
the
blackest
hair
dye
in
human
history
absorbing
99.96%
of
visible
light.

&
I
do
not
make
this
shit
up
one
word
at
a
time.

I
retreat
from
illumination
in
order
to
worm
into
the
darkness
that
is
all
mine

&
named

&
named

Kevin McIlvoy

Kevin McIlvoy lives in Asheville, North Carolina. His newest books include At the Gate of All Wonder (Tupelo, 2018) and 57 Octaves Below Middle C (Four Way, 2017). For twenty-seven years he was editor in chief of the literary magazine, Puerto del Sol, at New Mexico State University. All of these poems are from a new collection, The River Scratch. The title of “Around my bed America was falling” is directly taken from two lines (“Around my bed / America was falling”) in the Ilya Kaminsky poem, “We Lived Happily During the War.”