First Things RSS Feed - Michael McFee

Pilgrimage

Tue, 01 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Six days a week, this solo pilgrimage
across the wildnerness
of weedy sloughs
and uphill root-snares and dead-lightning limbs
to the mailbox,
celestial castle on the hill,
a shining silver roadside barrel vault
with a bloody flag
recently lowered
and a drawbridge I let down while lifting out
my daily bread,
the world’s delivered words
I bear back to the house along a path
my feet have carved
into the local earth
for decades now and know so well they could
tightrope its shallow gulley in the dark.

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Compact

Thu, 01 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0400

The uplifted unfolded phone
casts its lunar digital glow
on the face of the young woman pausing
to scan its screen before snapping
the microelectronics shut
the way my mother would close her compact,

that slim round clamshell
whose hard black plastic shallow halves
opened to offer a handy mirror
hinged to pressed powder
she’d deftly pad onto her tired turned cheeks
before hiding it in the purse with a click,

that vanity the size of a rotary’s slow dial”
a way to reach herself, a local call.

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