Bridal Shower
“Who was that lady I saw you with last night?”
Henny Youngman
That was no lady,
that was the nightingale
cursed into human form.
The light personified.
My unmovable burden.
What you saw you never saw.
A current of flesh in the tidal hour.
Miss Pennypinch the flowergirl.
Good Queen Carbon of the corrosive.
Princess of sick.
Mother to the waterworn.
My beloved mistress.
I love her like salt,
she who is without witness.
My borrowed pearl,
whose voice is the bee
in the idylls of a honeycomb.
My sugar spoon.
My dollop of black jam
on the toast to morning.
Lust’s burnished amulet.
Aunt Madness.
The girl I love is a cup
lifted to a bloodied mouth.
My lips tremble,
tremours of blithe affection.
Look, here is her footprint
in an acre of sand,
she who goes beside me,
who walks at my right hand.
Lady of the clock.
Duchess of rare fortune.
My rain, my flower,
our two halves eternal
and I her little god –
lest she believe in me.
Of Course, This Was Some Time Ago
There were two wrongs making a right,
which needn’t concern us at this juncture.
Instead, notice my invisible master
pulling on an infinite number of trousers.
See the rat in the magical maze of my mind
mop his sweating brow with his little rat-handkerchief
before bravely continuing a nearly impossible task.
Notice, if you would be so kind as to bother,
the eternal bickering between light and dark matter.
Gets so you don’t know whether to spit or go blind.
These little dusty books of ours get so heavy and old
we have to put on our spectacles and squint real hard.
And still we’re not sure what it is that’s running toward us.
Or is it, as someone suggested, we who are running away?
© Bruce McRae
Originally from Niagara Falls, Ontario, Pushcart Prize nominee Bruce McRae is a musician who has spent much of his life in London and British Columbia. He has been published in hundreds of periodicals and anthologies. His first book, The So-Called Sonnets, is available from the Silenced Press website http://silencedpress.com/books/ or via Amazon books. To hear his music and view more poems visit his website: www.bpmcrae.com.
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