The Ninth Commandment

For this, I traveled an hour through
snow and Christmas traffic -
Latte-sipping, graduate program poets
and an uncomfortable chair

An earnest young man stands,
delivers his vision of innocence.
A childhood peopled with grandfathers
hunting for arrowheads and fossils
in dry creek beds in Connecticut
or Kentucky
- I can't remember which -
my attention taken by her, his girl.
Adoring, yet cool, in her smart girl glasses,
black hair wound tight as watch springs,
and those legs, long enough
to hold your shoulders like a vise.

He now tells us he is a tree -
imagining his leafy fingers
outstretched to the sky -
while I imagine mine
reaching under her blouse.
I ask myself why he isn't writing about her?
As he tells how his branches scrape the water
her branches scraping my back,
The wind sings to him,
She nearly breaks my eardrum
with her screaming.
He tastes the summer rain
I taste blood where she's
bitten my lower lip.

Now he's in a schoolroom
in Indiana or Illinois,
his obsession with geography brings
me back to earth and the question
of why doesn't he write about her?
But, he will - someday - the day she leaves him
and every day after that
when she steps out of his
vision of innocence and
into someone's a little less so.

Kaleidoscope

for Vanessa Lyman

There is a difference
Between refraction and reflection:
A difference between a May sky gone silver;
Shimmering with lighted water -
A screen from cloud to earth -
And, say, light bent and cracked
Into spectra by a broken windshield.

You insert your glass bead words,
Cut and beveled, leaded and stained,
Into paper tubes with mirrored phrases
Ground and polished to a lustrous sheen. Inveigling us to view the constellation
You have wrought with the light
Cutting through your ravaged eyes.

^

Biography

Barney F. McClelland has published numerous short stories, articles, and poems. These publications include Birmingham Poetry Review, Touchstone, Windsor Review, The Poetic Page, Forum, South Dakota Review, State Street Review, Pencil Press Quarterly, Zelo, Florida Magazine and others. In 1979 he was the recipient of the Mary Reid McBeth Memorial Award for Fiction. He currently works as a freelance writer in Cincinnati, Ohio and is the managing editor of An Cailleach Press.