June 18, 2023After the Death of Cormac McCarthy …
Over there, there is a green thing in the way,
under the silver of the moon that isn’t shining
because it is the daytime, and on its many arms,
there are so many thorns you could call it a coat,
a thorn coat, and there is always someone climbing
its trunk and hurting their hands so much so.
A little boy is climbing and a little girl is climbing
and with them the ghosts of their dead grandparents
and their unborn children’s children and a caterpillar
who only knows how to eat and eat, thorn and leaf,
on the way to becoming a butterfly and a brown bear
and a goldfish out of water flopping upward
and a wolf pup and a lion cub and an eagle without
a nest and you and me and every mother and father
and son and daughter who ever was—we are all
climbing and climbing and climbing until our hands
ache and ache and ache and make a cradle of that ache
and hang a lullaby in the air above that cradle
and we are all going up and up and up and it is
painful and strange because we are all also falling
down and down and down, deeper than the deepest
part of the ocean, which is singing to us in the way
a humpback whale does or in the way the waves
sing to the shore and if you listen very closely,
you can hear a great great writer whispering
to the waves in us and the trees in us and the thorns
and all that climbing and all those cut palms
and bleeding fingers. Listen. He is ending his book.
He is ending the great book of his life. He has no
say in this, but he is saying on the last page: fly them.
from Poets Respond