Little Yes After Little Yes
People say no and yes sometimes.
At the same time. Yeah, no. Yes. No no-Yeah.
They mean Yes.
Always yes but are stuck in the No
for a while to show they are trying.
In this case, I kept saying Yes.
First, to going out and having lunch
alone even though my nerves were shot
even though I hadn’t been out for a long time
Yes to the little pub at the seawall and the table
outside and to the wind that came up
and the cold that tore through until Yes
I went inside and looked for a seat.
There were none. A man offered to share
The bench and I almost said no no but
Yes I said instead and scooted in where we ate
the fish out of their little fried jackets
and left those on the plate. Yes
to the shiver-walk on the beach
Yes
to tea when I learn about his
Late
Yes
Wife, and then I tell of My Dearly Departed
Husband who had once been Yes
And Oh
we said to each other.
A Made Thing in the Wild
For Fanny Howe
Once, a poet lost her poem
in the Galtee Mountains of County Cork.
She died before she found it.
The poem, tangled in
stone-yellows and thorns,
may be
sparkling still
under the gorse so
other poets went looking,
brushing through thickets
under yew and ledge,
crossing the blankety hills,
holding out their hands.
To come upon a little nest—
wee small bones in the crux—
or a gossamer line
dragged and huffed in the wind,
hooking into the verse—
the poets wished for this.
Like wolves
they searched,
coaxed and coaxed,
away from the cottage door.
Frances McCue is poet, writer, arts instigator, and professor. Frances’s poetry books
read as novels, taking us through the life of a stenographer who refuses to take
dictation (The Stenographer’s Breakfast), or the world of Marrakesh where a
tragedy ensues (The Bled). Timber Curtain traces Seattle’s Hugo House building into
redevelopment. Her prose collections are The Car That Brought You Here Still Runs,
about poet Richard Hugo and the U.S. Pacific Northwest towns he wrote about, and
Mary Randlett Portraits. McCue’s new literary start-up: Pulley Press, a poetry
imprint that celebrates poetry and poets from rural places, has published Ricardo
Ruiz’s We Had Our Reasons (winner of the 2023 Washington State Book Award);
Man with a Rake by Ted Kooser and Mankiller Poems by the late Cherokee Chief
Wilma Mankiller. Frances is a Teaching Professor at the University of Washington
where she won the UW Distinguished Teaching Award. Her forthcoming book is
Thinking Like a Poet from Columbia University Press.
Innisfree 42
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