June 2006
fever of the divine
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oh aye you slung me in sails you carried me
while degrees of heat dissolved the distance
that heat approached all my oddments and ends
all my surface left to the sun
solar shine, that, corona’s tone a cure
perimeter shine, my ensoulmment, my emulsion
from that sailor’s sheet: oh blue-black of sky evacuated
white of the sheet’s weave as well
I asked of fevers out of fevers
fever relief or release
and undiseased, unlapsed, you laughed, you gasped
gods
there is but one heaven, lover, no other need –
the host that is sunken, and its colors, these
Through the Shotgun House, with Violins
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If you weren't so ------ you'd know better.
Vinyl 45's or radio portable: pretended.
Screen door, light-door, horizontal chance
back-borne as burn and burden: weight
and spring to make the needle keen.
Over tangerine meat pulped on coquina
we designed to prefer poise, piano-time,
each key the weight of stone disjointed.
In place of note untended, we molasses,
fixed to the annum our limbs lank seasonal,
awkward akimbo, aboriginal. What instinct
stole us our azalea-shine? Girl you run
like your hair was on fire. I fan my fingers
over your lapsed eyes, mimic the epileptic
white of sunlight through palm spines.
By reverie yet irreverent thus achieve
the assumption of sulk, of seed and soil.
Ply dirt into my fingerprints, get loose
to the thieves' inch along the radio dial.
No matter, no mass, that there is no
ever-summer: all winters greened
dark to depth, greened to self & sugar,
coin of the comer's world, awful faces
dust-sweetened. You little monsters.
Sick on mirror-water from the hose,
sick on planet seen through that water,
sinuous, indistinct as fever. I see us:
seizure shotgun from front door
to black back door of this house.
I know the occurrence of objects
in this climate. Even music, if left
to our weather, will warp within days.
Boys with Crucifixes
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Salvation or shoulder-blades scissoring.
Confirmation silver a pendulum and sternum, a swing.
Cured of age, boys with crucifixes carry lightly their noise.
Exit by one then exodus, balsam doors white on their backs,
their air freight, their kite-along.
Boys married to a music so slow
it severs, cleaving cells, spindle by spindle.
Slow music to take us to deuces / boys with crucifixes
Shine with the vanity of plants under glass.
Folios crease in humid minds while in time
the sun leeches the sheets to lemon-white.
A year for the wind to turn a page:
A train would whisper right through me.
 Ray McDaniel lives in Ann Arbor, a transplant from Florida. He graduated from U-M's creative writing program in poetry in 1995. His first book of poems, Murder (a Violet), won the National Poetry Series competition, and it will be followed next year by a new book, Saltwater Empire, from which these poems are taken.
Besides poetry, Ray writes spectacularly clever essays about contemporary poetry for Fence magazine's The Constant Critic, and serves as emcee and host of the reading series at Ann Arbor's legendary independent bookstore Shaman Drum.
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