Sample Poems by Scannell McCormick

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Self-Portrait in a Garden

All thumbs, and none of them green, but better
To be here than at the keyboard, fingers
Picking at my tercets, or fingers scared

Stiff as the poem goes bad. The page damns
Everything, in black and white: each badly
Turned word, expected sentiment. The earth

Forgives: if I keep spreading peat, I may
Yet turn this post-glacial lake-bottom marl
Into soil. What comes from the earth forgives,

Too: I regularly hack the cranesbill
And wormwood, but they come back. Marriage month
Favors roses - I have one, St. Patrick,

Yellow with a thin green lip on every
Petal - but the old climber from next to
My grandfather's deathbed has been blooming

Seventy years, despite weather and my
Own injudicious pruning. Some turning
Of mud, some spreading of dried blood to keep
The tulip-topping squirrels away - nothing,
Really. I'll pick the borage leaves to dry
And boil for a soothing tea, maybe crush

A leaf of pennyroyal to keep off
Yellow jackets. The fountain spits into
Its slick basin, the Stargazer lilies,

Whose pollen stains badly, open their sweet,
Maculate mouths. Nothing to do, really,
Except take credit for God's plenty, sign

My name to His lines: in the lawn, rake, spade,
Nippers, trowel; on the stone bench, I and
The devil's twin workshops, my idle hands.

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Photograph of Your Mother Looking for Four-Leaf Clovers

This is to be expected: her archaic hemline, slow curl
Of her permanent wave, and Tennessee clouds licked clean of
Their blackberry underflush to black and white, two by two,
A border's thin scallop. Nevertheless, it's dangerous: it's unhidden
itself,
Again, and this time, you cry. She's seated on gray
Lawn, she's half-turned on her arm. This was her
Talent: how wide the field, she would see the sole
Fourth leaf (round, deeper green at the base). Fingers winnowing
Grass, she doesn't know either the camera's whir, or lucklessness.
She doesn't know - or yet - that absence makes the heart.

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Jay in Dragonflies

How did they know to come, little love, know to
Hover in your yard, Klimt-gold in first September? How

Did they - subtle-winged as your caught breath, clever-
Bodied as the slim fingers flared from your

Poised hands - know to find you? Light as finger-bones, they drowse
And whir above long spoiled iris, half-wild climber rose,

Toppling stonecrop. You, newly seven, hold
At the lawn's browned edge, at air's stilled

Edge, catch in your soft-? browed eyes each beating creature,
Thrumming, afloat. Your heart, like them, darts, thrums - four

Times, maybe - then you throw yourself among them, stand
In wing-quick light. They throng you, kind to kind.

for my nephew

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Woman Writing

Her fingers, the paper, penworn,
Sleepless as the songweary crickets in the rows of sugarbeets:

At words, at one word, his soul flips shut,
Like a book.

Maybe she frowns, pushes back her hair - some unremarkable gesture:
Not "like a book,"

Not for him back home building deerstands in the northeast
Or fishing among circles of fishnests...

Again she tries to write to him, spell out to his letterlessness.
Instrokes, curve and cross-bar. Inklines.

Only she and the pageworn night will read them.
Maybe she looks off.

Maybe she begins to want the meanings
In stinking fields, beetweary, blueblack as crickets,

And, unopened beneath his bed, in her one sent letter:
The primer and wordbook of love.