Campbell Corner Language Exchange


The Poetry of Laura McKee

Letter to My Aunt

(Certainty)


Letter to My Aunt

Sometimes, you get to the top of a ladder and discover you're at the wrong building.
- Joseph Campbell

"Anymore questions about the fall?" The fall knocked my head ajar and a soul crept in.
It spends its days napping on the hide-away, answering the phone "Acme
Night Owl Service" or alternately "Edifice Architects, may I help you?"
These days, the air in the morning is cooler.
A blue sky and weaker sun host whispered conferences on the balcony.
We should stay. We're entitled. We should organize for a sense of mystery.
We could do better than the north wind's dwindling scarf of migratory ducks.
The soul has your manner: a handful of wings, a grin in its voice,
a little bit happier than you were perhaps. Sleeps a lot.
A good day walks it down and back along the six blocks between the cathedral
and movie theater. There's the house that hatches plots. There's the house
with the plastic lawn. "Sometimes a smaller circle will occur inside a larger circle."
Like that time a boy waiting at the corner found a View-Master near the stop sign.
I can see it as if I were there--a strange shape flung out a car window,
as blue as the sky, fourteen extra larger pictures.




(Certainty)

At first we carried the snow in our mouths to see how long we could keep it whole.
The snow is order, we said and began to speak, in place of snow, about heat and order.
Then we began to build. All summer long, the blazing noon-
time men bend and straighten on the roofs above us. Wheel barrows, ropes,
ladders, tar trowels. Order in our mouths affected order
in our mouths: there were no finished statements, no rest. In place of rest,
we raised houses and miracles, lifted stains whole from the carpets. All summer long, ablaze
at noon, women bend and straighten into voices across the playground, lining us up
at one end of an underground speaking tube for our names to organize out of thin air,
for the start to move us into our mouths and our mouths change us into parts we can believe.