Free This Blue : Poems (9781466875074) by Maureen N. McLane Page B

is woman
always secretly pulling me toward you
as if I had no resistance
as if the clothes I wore were merely draped
on a mannequin as if I were merely an earthbound species with new skin
that fur an old animal’s fur
reclaimed by another.
    Did you see the subtle shift from umber to somber to ochre on the walls of Les Caves de Lascaux?
    What ibex steps as beautifully as you
    what ancient bison shakes the steppes
    what gazelle’s ankles are so perfectly turned as yours?
    There are no crackheads in prehistory but surely
    they were addicted to something those hominids
    strutting their way out of the savannah—
    I demand the sun
    shine on me
    I demand the moon bare its face in the night
    and lo! damn! see how these heavenly bodies do what they do
    like clockwork before clocks
    like skin before clothes
    like the earth before the parting of the waters revealed
    the earth was the earth is the earth …
    And if she only likes vegetable things
    that grow toward the light
    and if she will not eat your roots and tubers
    how then choose
    between a rooting boar and an urban forager—
    There is beauty in indistinct areas the microtonal
    hover where the ear buzzes so—
    There is a gasp a sharp breath in a sharp wind reminding
    you the wind was someone’s breath chilled.
    Clouds are now fashionable as they were in John Constable’s day Luke Howard having taxonomized the little buggers in 1803: cumulus, cirrus, etc.
    So let’s go skying with Constable let’s scan
    the horizon as if we were sailors
    able to read the sky          Let’s blast off
    and outsoar the noctilucent clouds
    I espy with my little stratospheric eye.
    Do you think I’m afraid of crashing to earth?
    Love we’ve been falling ever since falling made way for a leap.

EMBROIDERED EARTH
    embroidered earth
    refusing an undesigned mind
    uphold me now
    it’s hard to walk
    secure on your pillowed ground
    mossed ferned & grassed
    this tapestried field
    may it yield to an unsteady step
    & take only the softest impress
    the enfolded brain pressing
    against a carapace
    millennia ago unfolded
    a species and its walk—
    a steady upright walk

ICE PEOPLE, SUN PEOPLE
    Something to it, the thought
    of a people like its clime
    or thereby impressed—
    my lunchtime lassitude dissolved
    the minute I moved from the sun
    to this shadowed grass.
    I could invent the wheel now
    & soon the cotton gin
    and steam engine &
    let’s not forget
    it won’t be long now
    before nuclear fission.
    Nothing’s beyond
    my airconditioned ken.
    My offshore multinational’s
    humming more power
    than the biggest powerstation in Hoboken.
    My shadowed shade
    my intemperate glade my big fat thrum.
    Let’s call it progress, this.
    Let’s call it whatever it is.

BELFAST
    Your velvet hills came to me
    last night in the pool
    how they hugged the fraught city
    the pubs filled and buzzing
    the Europa unbombed now for years.
    Your political murals are kitsch
    and history’s a ditch
    for lying if we let
    the gravediggers
    name us. Let’s bury
    our pseudonyms
    all undisclosed.
    Was Scarlett O’Hara’s father
    a blustering Ulsterman
    or was he a peasant
    like granddad from Wicklow
    tender and fond amidst the riot
    and kind to his slaves
    but for the obvious?
    White people are weird
    with their vitamin D
    and sunravaged skin.
    So far from an equator
    it’s hard to walk the line
    in a cleaved world.
    Orange, green, navy blue
    the colors are weapons
    as were some horses
    in the 19th century.
    Freed by machines
    see how they race
    on fragile ankles—
    beauty a late flower
    of disuse. Your storefronts
    were boarded, your university
    Victorian, the linen quarter
    defunct. The solid brick
    that shelters us unmortared
    smashed a window.
    Your sky hung low your beer
    rode high your visiting Masons
    sober and punctual.
    A Days Inn here
    is a Days Inn anywhere
    but for the marchers gathering
    their