Joshua McKinney
On The Sixth Day of Renovation
You must promise never to
question the serious notion
of work and its stern cultivation
in school. This peculiar type of equivalence
is an A-frame, the dust unsettled
from where the contractors changed
their saw blades, and later still,
changed their feet to wheels.
The dark promise of the penciled diagram
was unsettled when the preacher arrived to work.
Someone noted a kind of equivalence
between his hat and the steeple of
the old school. He’d show them,
he said. He would school them in the art
of nailing, which had changed
since the years of forced equivalence.
To promise, to afford a basis for expecting
work, such was the artifice time unsettled.
Just then the dark roof of bats
unsettled itself from the rafters of the school,
and shrieking, the structure’s equivalence
to anything was brought into question,
changed as vapor from rain the sky promised.
“Here we go again,” someone said.
“In work we find value, and in work,
sacred work, we find relief
from the puzzling unsettled.
Furthermore, work is a kind of promise.
Why else go to night school?”
Thus the preacher spoke, his voice
changed to its thunderous Sunday equivalence,
inviting them to find equivalence
in all things: joy, sin, work,
or any aspect of nature that changed
when they looked away, reappearing
unsettled, inhospitable to measure,
as words school like catfish around
the redolent promise of cheese balls.
“Equivalence is promise,” said the preacher.
Changed, unsettled, the contractors went
back to work on the school.
from Mad Cursive
III
The weightless gratitude of waking falls.
Prodromal reaching for the solid
house forgets the gate. Late,
the mind rehearses Death’s many attitudes,
all kind and all one. Reading, I noted
a peripheral mouse move quick through the kitchen,
and the verses blurred an instant on the page.
Later, the cat came speaking
what words it could and placed the mouse
dead at my feet. What nature reverses
itself without death? We live in the
V
During those years I lived in two cities,
one atop the other like a steeple
perches on a church. Discontent,
I thrived, read the signs posted
by nameless committees, attended parties
hosted by kind people like me.
Then there were the others who led their lives
unseen somehow in the stark light of that place.
One city fair, one unable to thrive.
And though my voice carried, I said nothing.
Today I read that Rosa Parks is dead.
VI
When that which has no thickness enters
the gap, how easily it moves along!
One’s art avoids the ligatures, takes
advantage, takes everything. And all
we get to keep is our devotion.
A blow makes heart, or not,
accordingly. It does no good to rage.
“The loss is not as great as one might think,”
Enrico Fermi said, dying at age fifty-three,
from cancer. He hoped to set his friends at ease,
then unto