A
poem from Kyle McCord's Galley of the Beloved in Torment
followed
by a note on the author
Still
Are the Strings of the Ancients
About
us, the quality or lack of our luminescence,
we'll never make up our mind.
Evils
we do or don't
(little good it does)
refract, depending, as they do,
on
our angle of vantage.
The
light that does, (the good)
we take for granted:
the yard lit whether we
wake it or not.
The
light that doesn't,
should it reach our cornea
some night when the ancestors
allow,
we would never forget.
But
barring these,
minus praise or antipathy,
an object, say a hand
turning
a room into view,
continues its present course unabated.
By
comparison or resistance,
we become not-our-father,
permitting a part of
him to live on
in antithesis
when we were happy enough
to see him surface
a last time
from the myriad cancers and go.
We
were happy enough
to travel and to be broken
and later to be reconstituted
into statues.
To
surmise this as bravery
in our friends and to continue on
in the copper
heart.
Even
if it clangs and knocks,
even if it recognizes no one.
©
Kyle
McCord is a recent graduate of the MFA Program at UMass-Amherst. His manuscript,
A Nesting Doll, was selected as a finalist for the 2008 Orphic Prize and
a semi-finalist for the Cleveland Book Prize. He has work forthcoming or published
from Columbia: a Journal of Art and Literature, Cream City Review,
Fourteen Hills, Diagram, William and Mary Review, the Portland
Review, the American Poetry Journal and elsewhere.
