Morning Commute with Revenant
You know how it is: going in to work,
who looks anything? You’re late, it’s cold,
hot, raining, no buses again, whatever.
You’re long past fighting this fast-forward blur,
pure A-to-B time, better numbed than bored.
But then the street-views you sluice through slow and lock:
some old warehouse abutting a blacktop lot.
Why here? Don’t say a bird.
You do and this is over.
No birds, no clouds, nothing with petals or fur.
What then? Don’t expect much:
high up this soot-caked chainlink fence
that nets, for no one else, blank swaths of sky,
there juts forth a sawn-off sumac branch,
em dash black and cocked at ten-to-three.
See it first, since you must, as a quenched torch,
a club hanging half-swung,
or someone’s bony forearm thrust through the mesh,
lopped at wrist and elbow, and left as a warning.
Fine. But you’re not one to confuse
fancied-up musings with the truth:
one hapless stick is all the chainsaw left
the day someone decided
this tree—a weed that wedged upwards from
the cracks its seed happened among,
that rose against the traffic-ravaged air,
that pierced that fence and knuckled this pavement up—
had to come down.
Rough cobblestones plug the square yard
where its raw stump once weathered anvil-hard;
no doubt the sheared-off roots still grip
deep undertiers of pipe and stone.
A passing siren’s wave-crest flushes you
back in the churning surf of city noise,
but by now it’s too late:
you’ve gone and glimpsed that voided silhouette,
you’ve heard, in its tousling leaves’ soundless hiss,
another of those random sidewalk elegies
work alone can dismiss.
And not because it isn’t true,
because it is.
Author Bio: James McKee enjoys failing in his dogged attempts to keep pace with the unrelenting cultural onslaught of late-imperial Gotham. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Acumen, The Raintown Review, Saranac Review, The South Carolina Review, THINK, The Midwest Quarterly, Xavier Review, and elsewhere. He currently works as a private tutor and spends his free time, when not writing or reading, traveling less than he would like and brooding more than he can help.