Sample Poems by Robert McNamara
A Pastoral
The house was dark, huddled in maples
on the cusp of fall. She was visiting
friends about whom I remember only
that they were beautiful in dirndls
and white blouses, in swirling kitchen steam.
I had arrived in love, and at dinner
a hand reached over my shoulder
with a teeming plate and an apology --
failed Hollandaise on the wild asparagus --
brushing my ear like fire. Her eyes were
open, stream-quick, bright and clear.
Some time after we broke up, a friend
said we'd seemed two lonely people
clinging to each other like a raft. It stung,
true, and of so many couples failing,
faring forward. And the raft? A house,
fall firing the encircling maples, the plenty
of wild asparagus along the watercourse
where we lay on the banks to guess
the bottom from the surface of the stream.
And downstream, skinny-dippers,
yelping, hollering, breaking into air.
Dahlias
They arrive on my desk, a clear demonstrative bunch
prickly and blood-red, passion's messengers
even without your note -- three years ago when
dahlias were in bloom -- making the room stand back,
and the little of everything on the mantel, sweet pea
and freesia, larkspur, bristly mourning bride
rooted in a single thickness of glass stones.
The flowers bell like balls in a Galton board, figures
of chance, the rain stopping, sun glancing off
the gilded slope of a pagoda, its reach released in cloud.
And in the garden, a fat bee humming in the trumpet
of a squash flower fumbles with information like a god.
Solstitial
Rocket and chard explode in the p-patch. Three
kids, intent as thieves,
trowel toward China while their mother weeds.
Outside the fence, the homeless loaf, in place
everywhere like the grass
or windows dancing to the car-blast bass.
Caught in the overhead wires like a kite, the sun
lolls and shines on all of us. The breeze is light.
A Page From the Book
It was as though the house had shaken
or a draft through the parted doors had taken
upon itself to clear the room
of the brightly colored streamers and balloons,
and gathered leaf by leaf the pages
inscribed with the year's or season's messages,
taking them in its arms, and whirled
like a clockwise dervish, dreaming beyond the world
under his feet, now blanketed
with bright detritus, beautifully dead.
What does it dream? It dreams of when
in limber fashion the world had sprung up green
draping the dust and the bony trees
with green, assonant with seems,
and hard of hearing rhymed by sight with been.