Evening in Santa Fe

 

Terri L. McCord

We chase context

with a camera,

sunset in place midway—

 

you wink one eye

minutes later sky

begins its slow dissolve,

 

descent. One word you mouth,

your lips an “O” like the sun.

I cannot hear you.

 

I make the sky look

torn through my lens—

clouds are rips you seem

 

to mend with your arms

outstretched as if

you are a scale.

 

We move together to higher ground.

 

It is on the tip of my tongue now.

What I wanted to capture.

The sun, a pill I swallow.

That close.

 

And the light just right

for this shot

as we glow from without.

 

200 New Mexico Poems Project, March 2012

First Atomic Explosion

at a Distance of Five Miles,

Trinity site, new mexico

lost alamos project

 

Terri L. McCord

after a gelatin silver print,

Los Alamos Museum

 

The image shivers behind glass;

infamous cloud convexes, colludes

with air like parachute sails.

I want it to be something

else: a glowing jellyfish

in a sea of sky; a bulging eye

painted by Dali, an eye that mouths,

“See? You are enraptured”;

the white blanket

 

my parents shook out

and let float to the grass

for the family picnics; the middle

of a hiccup; all the spaces

between all my thoughts; the bloodless

tip of my thumb pressed

by my nail; the imagined

ghost never seen.

 

The Art and the Wait Chapbook, 2008 Finishing Line Press

 

 

The Healing

 

Terri L. McCord

Say the room is cellophane

air clear

 

except where you are—

 

the rest, a giant bandage

of nothing.

 

See through the room

to when

 

 you came in—

to err is past.

 

This space is the cot,

windows sutured

 

with blinds.

Say, in this room there are no eyes.

 

You have all the room

in the world to heal.

 

Become transparent too.

Go away.

 

Clearly, you can say anything now

 

in a voice without

a visible tongue

on the roof of your mouth

that could be this room.

 

Your tongue can settle—rest

like a blanket on your needs.

 

S4

 

Terri L. McCord

The ground moves

with clumps of “lovebugs,”

balls of black insects—

flies, actually—

in the bloomed-out, gone-awry

Forsythia, red pin-points

on each bald body

like a banquet of valentines.

 

They are here only

to mate—

still we are wary

to step on unstill grass

and their end-on-end frenzy.

 

 

The left-out hose pipe, a fissure

in the roil, dog-gnawed,

reminds us

of the yard that used to be ours.

The cats, too, levitate

the brush like holy beasts

of prey.

 

We let loose

the dog. We can’t help

ourselves, but watch,

as with one

quick motion,

she eats love      in half.

 

Cortland Review, April 2009