PoetryMagazine.com Editor's Featured Poet Louis McKee

Louis McKee
USA

Photo Credit: Robin Hiteshew

Louis McKee has published five collections of poetry, most recently, Near Occasions of Sin, as well as nine chapbooks. Adastra Press has just published Marginalia, a letterpress edition of his translations of monastic quatrains from the Old Irish. He was the editor and publisher, until its recent demise, of One Trick Pony. His literary essays and poetry reviews have been published widely

LETTER TO HEYEN

The failing Philadelphia light….
Bill, I wish I were somewhere
with a suggestive name and streets
like songs I could sing for you,
drunk on unfamiliar night air,

but I’m home, as I too often am,
and reminded of you, that I owe you
a letter, by a box of old photographs
I was looking through tonight. My mother,
mostly, younger than I ever knew her.

That’s a line of yours, I know.
I sent that poem of yours – was it
a year ago now? – to a friend
in the midwest who was having a bad time
with her mother. More failings.

When all is said and done, that
is what we’ll have, no matter what
we call them, and they will all be piled,
one on top of the other, in the corner.
Out of the way, we’ll tell ourselves.

And we’ll sit back in our chairs,
the big comfortable ones
that we have come to trust, and try
to see, to make sense of it all –
at least until we get tired of trying

and throw a sheet over the mess;
out of sight, out of mind. But no,
that’s not going to happen.
It’s cold tonight, Bill -- snow is falling.
I’ve put the photographs back

in their box and put the box away.
The light is dying, but the snowflakes,
when they fall past the streetlamp
on the corner across the street,
snap brightly for a moment. Like a spark.

This is not a song, exactly,
but I think, maybe, you can whistle the tune.
I’ll write again soon, Bill, the next time
I get somewhere good, someplace
with a neat name. Until then, stay warm.

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