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Mary MacRae’s second collection
published Aug 10 by Second Light Publications. See order form (pdf file) for discount offers
He says again, he
doesn’t know how he used
to fit everything in,
he doesn’t know where it goes,
the time, it just evaporates…
Watching from the balcony
it’ll all be wound up he says,
by the end of next year,
the old brewery
as two huge metal tanks
suspended in air like flies in aspic
are lowered over its brick wall
onto waiting barges
bound for elsewhere
and I find myself thinking
of odds and ends, how it was
always he who used to say, Don’t fret…
Now he sees it go,
a barge that slips away
as light returns again:
the empty river’s trick
a gleam of silverware,
those centuries of beer,
ship-loads of sugar, yards of steel
whose yellowed ledgers state
in neat black script
their clear economy of
trade and deficit, while love,
the one timepiece that endures,
waives past debts,
and borrows only to exchange,
is like the strange December moon,
the long-night moon,
keeper of the light, of human dust
and the vanished years, clocking
the measure of our fate.
in collectionSmall Disturbances, 2016, Rockingham Press
