Two Poems

Khrynn Yvonne McManus

Certain Interims

It occurs between three and four a.m.,
more precise than Greenwich mean,
an empyrean chronometer, a sneak preview.
I almost do not find it frightening anymore.

It can not fool me; I know it is a funeral. I am so
good at expecting it now. I could use Fibonacci
to tally it up. I could do its sum on an abacus. It
is an abecedarium mathematics; it is not a science.

I know how to watch for signs. Thomas Hardy, in 
Tess of the D’Urbervilles, gave the poor milkmaid
the idea of her death; he made her see it in her mirror,
like Elaine spotting Lancelot, miniature and upside down,

a mirage in the shield-that-was-not-a-shield. He said
each of us feels the hour of his demise, an instinct, an
itch in the glial cells, a predestination, that we celebrate
this date unwittingly, a secret subconscious birthday

party in reverse. It is something we rehearse. It is
memento mori on the Lay-Away plan, a receipt for
merchandise not yet purchased, a contract, a narrative
in episodes . . . My birthday is only six months away;

I will be twenty-eight in November. Do we remember what
it was like, to have died all those times before? There must
have been certain interims between the goings and the 
     comings
back, coherences of sleeptalk, but we have forgotten them.

Once I have lit a cigarette, I continue to inhale,
even after I have ceased to enjoy it. I drag, I drag,
I drag again . . . It is a procedure, a sequence, a fifth
of hard liquor. It must progress. It must be done with.

Two Admissions

“Excuse me,” the receding hairline mumbled,
as it shuffled past me, and so on, up the flight.
His sandwiches and he
were on some kind of Top Secret Mission,

and I was a diminutive boulder which barred
their path to True Greatness and promises of
Future Glory in the recondite offices
of Ham-and-Cheese-on-Wheat.

“Excuse me,” I corrected. I was apologetic.
I did my best to make my aggregate baggage
of chromosomes and synthetic fibers
very very very small, very melt-into-the-wall,

quite anonymous. I could have been dead.
We did not make eye contact. We did not brush shoulders
or even glance backward; I believe we mistrusted
one another. “Excuse me.”

We exchanged that humdrum anti-greeting
like a high salaam in an Eastern dream.
Roughly translated, the expression means:
“Do not look at me. Do not recognize me.

I am trying to pretend you are not there.
Some of us are monsters and disguised in hats.”
So I pressed my back to the railing, till he passed,
held my breath, so as to avoid upsetting

invisible vibrations. It was unwelcome I should
affect this creature in any way, that I should
allow him to affect me, that we should
engage in potentially dangerous relations.

Some of us were monsters
and some of us were dead.
But neither one of us failed to hear
what it was the other one said.