Two Poems|Bruce McRae
Letter From You
A letter from you
is like a slap on the backside.
A letter from you
is as rare as chickens singing.
Surely the postman
has accomplished a great task,
affection’s courier,
messenger of longings,
agent of deliverance.
A letter from you
is scented and stamped.
It’s travelled far.
The odds were against it:
storms and wars;
time and motion;
all those borders criss-crossed.
A letter from you
arrived unexpectedly.
I was washing windows
when the doorbell rang.
I was in the kitchen
counting coppers and dimes.
Hanging sheets from the rafters.
Looking for a missing woodscrew.
But it’s made the day,
a letter from you
like a physical emotion,
with vast cities gleaming
between sentences,
with rivers and mountains
and inky glories in time.
Reading your letter
is like standing on the shore
of a warm green ocean.
It’s another planet
and a moon is rising,
an alien moon, the ocean
as familiar as it is strange.
Our love unfathomed.
In And Of
A painting of the world
as it is in the moment.
Including turtles and tax returns.
Including carnations and palo verde.
With candlewax and dog-bark and cod roe,
the myopic painter mixing metaphors.
He stirs colours.
In this painting are a pig’s knuckles
and thigh bone of a Chaldean general.
There’s a coin dropped down a grate,
neither head nor tails.
A child is bawling for its mother.
There’s a car crash on the autobahn,
for which death is certain.
A deft hand has shaped a horse’s mane
and braid of wheat-coloured grasses.
It’s captured light’s moody temperament,
sunsets of pinks and purpled strands.
A contented cow. A miserable coxswain.
Millions of years in the making, this painting
contains pocket lint and buttons of ivory.
And there are you and I, we’re walking by the mill,
the artist having it rain. Impeccably portrayed,
we seem oblivious to time and loving.
Stood defiant to death’s erasure.
Photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash
Bio:
Bruce McRae, a Canadian musician currently residing on Salt Spring Island BC, is a multiple Pushcart nominee with over 1,600 poems published internationally in magazines such as Poetry, Rattle and the North American Review. His books are ‘The So-Called Sonnets’ (Silenced Press); ‘An Unbecoming Fit Of Frenzy’; (Cawing Crow Press); ‘Like As If’ (Pski’s Porch); ‘Hearsay’ (The Poet’s Haven).
