The Day
This week in the PEN Poetry Series, guest editor Heather Christle features a new poem by Anthony McCann. About McCann’s work, Christle writes: “Anthony McCann’s fourth solo poetry collection, Thing Music, which will be out from Wave Books this fall, opens with this new poem, “The Day,” an exciting doorway through which we animals descend. The poem make connections between eye and hand, between mouth and skin, sometimes letting words (the capitalized, the italicized) bang into a field of vision (loudly!), more often letting words shine in fast intervals that vibrate between waves of sound and light. They glimmer, flicker, twiddle, wiggle, and breed. Always attuned to speech’s coupled tendencies—the sensual and the cerebral—McCann makes slippery the distinction between the two. Here ideas are made physical in the bodies of reader and writer, bodies the page both hides and calls into mind. It’s a delightful, weird experience. Reading McCann’s poems is like being invited to lick the light.”
The Day
In this coupling
of speech
where everything
begins where
shimmering
began
please
put on my voice
and through
this voice
my eyes
I mean
this ringing
in my eyes
on the day
it went away
I mean The Day
it goes away
It is
the always
dying sound
the glimmer
of the bell
and the trees
ringing with light
Would you
touch
these breeding
nouns
these wires
are alive
in the silent
hiss
of space
as slipping
its face turns
rotates
in the leaves
the clarity
and shade
I want to say
Today
but today
it is The Day
that entered
in my face
I went there
on a sound
was smeared
with little shapes
while air
tumbled
through the chairs
silent
clothes
and bones
This doorway
looks
unsaid
as the animal
descends It opened
up its
flesh
and landed
in the day
the furling
unfurled
world
cool
shadows
in each cleft
It’s where
I come from Where
I say
leaves
twiddled
then
grew grave
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