Sample Poems by Mark McCaig

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Abundance

If Mac announced a red tide, we grandsons knew
to fetch the crab nets, stuff bushel baskets in tire tubes

so they'd float, tied behind as we walked the cove barefoot,
scooping crab after crab hiding in eelgrass, swaying coontail.

In '75 he tied a rowboat to his waist, and we filled its metal floor
with foot-tip skirling jimmies. The world had no end.

Now NASA dilates the Hubble wider. Staring, its black whale's eye
catches endless, nameless galaxies.

Tonight the crabs disappear, the skipjacks sail home empty.
I lash the rowboat. The moon points the way, as toes to net

I stretch, catching what's not there.

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Unsolicited Advice

Owsley Stanley, one-time acid-chemist and soundman for the Grateful Dead, the mythical Bear, stares out from the Internet. His website push-es his latest trip-meat-only diets to cure all. My uncle's friend, Type 1 with zero fat, corners me at a wedding: You've got to run eight miles a day, with weights. She pulls her insulin pump from a green cocktail dress bra. I mention my sweet blood poems. She lifts her champagne and I see the vein ripping her bicep. Poems? she asks. A Navy Tomcat pilot whose pancreas quit kept his wings by eating the exact same meals every day. The air reeks when the herbalist tries moxabustion, burning mugwort over my skin. She sends me home with a dusky cone and instructions, like all the others-drink your own urine, let the aliens take you for those probing tests, drag your ass to Lourdes with the feeble, the desperate, or at least to the fake grotto in DC, hell, at least go back to mass. Confess your sins. From the grave, Dad's voice again: no son of mine has diabetes. His last wife cooked macrobiotic food, told me how the perfect ratio of grains to root vegetables, sprinkled with seaweed, will beat cancer, much less diabetes. The list grows: hot yoga, acupuncture, Ayurveda. Why not Santeria, Ghost Dancing? I find one of Bear's early Dead shows- Fillmore West in '69, when his bathroom lab LSD still dropped clean. Now it's all meat and butter for him, and carbs are poison. The music thrums. He always got the mix right, the highs tight, the lows plush, so balanced, they sound, even on this day, as if they could go on and on forever.

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The Tendency of Things

to revert to form this morning.
Out the window a redbud flares,

blooms purple as an Easter priest.
Geese over the roof not in a vee

but a bell curve, imploring the north.
I tried church again, what with

the kids, maybe some answers
from the velvet kneelers. The frogs,

will they sing this year? The prodigal
brother, will he? How to stave off

suffering? Pollen films the windshield
green, no yellow, inviting one

of my girls to finger-draw
a heart. This, too, will wash away

with the rain. Maybe it's water
keeps us going, keeps the future

the future, always finding the bottom t
hen cycling to sky, vaporized.

Joe next door digs a diversion trench
uphill from his granddad's deathbed.

Estranged, my father passed in Jersey,
skipping last rites and viaticum,

no chrism crossed above his eyes,
waiting for the horse chestnuts

bristling outside his window
to fall.

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Zebracorn

Ferns whisper last night's rain
onto the ankles. A yellowthroat,
witchety, witchety from the meadow.
Hiking the Acorn Trail, up ahead
the man shuffles his Velcro sneakers.
Two adult sisters also in reunion tees
lock his arms as he shouts his latest
video game level: last night I made
a zebracorn. Gesturing to the sister
on the left, his noisy hands echo
a red-eyed vireo singing overhead.
Special needs. The other shoos him
to the edge so a listening man can pass.
It's half zebra, half unicorn,
his voice fading behind the soft crunch
of needles, behind the dappled wind-
flashes. From the pinetops,
some warbler trills, nesting, inscrutable.