5 poems

Ryan Mccarty

At the End of Our World

“Polar bears on an island off Russia's far eastern coast have taken over an
abandoned research station and made themselves at home.” —CBS News

Every few years we need bears
yawning for the cameras
on the broke down porches 
of our Cold War ghost towns. 
I mean, what is it about images 
of everything we’ve built 
gone to the beasts, like my daughter’s
new middle school pictures 
riding home on the storm
of accessories and euphemisms
her body has become? Vicious
as the songs she sings and the snarls
of hair barely fitting the frame,
her smile tears the door off the shack
we’ve abandoned and settles down
to lord over the ruins she’s making
her own, newsworthy as a blooming 
Arctic, ice-free and full of wild things. 

Students of the Seasons

Even the rich kids I am paid
to teach make beautiful
sounds when the first snow
sneaks up and shakes down
on them. They’re frozen.
Their cameras are out. They steal
one memory from the sky
and leave nothing behind
but shrieks, running 
from the cold. But the glory
is in the eyes of the boy
up since the steam of furnaces
kicking on, eventually knocking
to invite my daughter out.
Warm-bundled, like the ragged
burrs of motherwort
sleeping in the dirt along
the edge of the field, 
he will teach me to rise 
and feed the bees in spring.

Poetry and the Older Fires

“Humans were making fire 400,000 years ago, far earlier than once thought.”  —Associated Press

The ice hit and the busses stopped but the pilot
lit, so none of us died even a little. I watched you
fussing with candles, messing with the beeswax mix 
down on all fours, and the curve of you was hundreds
of thousands of years of fear kept at bay and juices
running from haunches hung up over flames. Before
you were there to show me how to tame the fire,
how to snap and rub it in these two hands, how
to carry it through the cold, I was like the other
sad shufflers I see creeping at the edge of storms,
waving dead boughs, begging for the lightning 
strike to take them, to smoke their bodies, to burn 
the darkness from their family’s little burrows 
for one more day. Before you, I could only curl
around my cold tools every night, the inhumane
stone words I smashed against each other
hoping to make the magic that now I find
flickering on the walls, our wicks trimmed perfectly, 
wax boiled away into nothing as I finish this line. 

A Deep-Creased Kind of Darkness

I keep a list of people whose deaths I’ve heard about
and thought good riddance. It’s always neatly folded 
in my wallet, between a bottle slip I never cashed 
and an old fortune that says “Who knows?” I pull it out 
sometimes – at the bus stop; as my coffee cools; 
while watching my son walk up the block after school, 
beautiful swing of long blonde looseness, unaware how 
every empty window might be a dark eye sighting something 
it’s certain the world needs to be relieved of. I hold this one 
single sheet because our own documented inhumanity 
is a five gram weight we should always keep with us, a paper 
we can shove between pages filled with all the other names 
we have memorized and carry in our hardcover hearts. 
They have to live in there together, till the last ink wears away,
or we burn through all the people, the deaths, or both. 

The Winter Arc

“It involves utilizing the cold, dark, earlier months of winter to turn inward and get a jump start on goals.” — Associated Press

What does it mean to drag a dead tree
out behind the garage 
on the day we think of as an end,
the one right before the next, when we drop 
our knee down in the mud, press one 
hand to our thigh, and rise up 
to start the trudge back to the top 
for another long roll? I hear “winter arcs”
were for the goal-oriented and process-based
this year, replacing those one-day 
resolutions of the soon-to-be-failures. 
Embrace the dark, they say. 
Let the first signs of cold collapse you
deep into hiding. Crouch through all the dead days
so your spring will be well-seasoned. 
Here in the north, the idea seems ice-bound, 
doomed into dependence on thaws and cutters
that might not break through till April. 
I wonder if I could spend the winter weaving 
an ark instead, from the soft green
boughs left on that dead tree, from the brown
limbs of its brothers and sisters laying 
round back still from years past, from the fine 
threads of forgotten birds’ nests and the hollow 
bones of their fallen children, from the light
aluminum cans left uncollected, 
from what the wind deposits 
all year long in the pockets 
between our back walls and fences. I wonder
if the rise and fall of everything the year has cast off  
could hold together while riding the crest
of this wave, scouting for a destination – a resolution
to the problem we’re already making
out of the coming days.