Andrew McLellan ~ Poems

Spolia

What remains for me: your books, war
relics, and pho­to albums.

With your books, you were quiet.
Trawling their depths
for under­lined pas­sages, marginalia,
I found only the cold
Victorian inscrip­tion from your father:

Many of my sen­ti­ments are stat­ed here­in.

The relics: a var­i­ome­ter plucked from a German fighter,
the face marked Steigt and Sinkt. The back is stamped
Dresden, from which protrude,
like arrows in St. Sebastian’s side,
two alu­minum tubes, one for each word.
Puffing one sends the white nee­dle dancing.

Another: the hub from the yoke
of a B‑17, gold Art-Decco inlay on black,
the ‘O’ in ‘BOEING’ with out­spread wings.

Of the dozens of photographs,
I begin with one: you and your squad
before L’Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel,
unknown to me as the iden­ti­ty of your grim
mates. Modeled after the arch that threads
the Colosseum and the Palatine, the original
com­posed of spo­lia, reused
frag­ments of oth­er buildings.

A col­umn from the arc bal­ances on your tilt­ed crush­er cap.
I fol­low its line upward to the loom­ing quadriga,
horse heads dis­solv­ing in the sky,
legs flat­tened against the chariot.

I look again, your body against the gray
of Paris, imag­in­ing the moment the shutter
clos­es, as you are turned in her direction,
think­ing of the Winged Victory of Samothrace

absent from her perch in the Louvre.
A muse­um without
its head­less goddess.

It was said that when she was returned
to her post atop the stairs, her marble
wings could be seen trembling.

~

Grandfather Knocks on the TV Screen as a Ghost in the Machine

Some morn­ings, crows congregated
in our back­yard, their haunting
iri­des­cence against the green
lawn and sharp annunciations

pierc­ing the walls of the house.
My moth­er, singing qui­et­ly to the tune
of Cops, always gave them a smiling
glare over the rim of her cof­fee mug,

Oh, there you are you
Bad boys, bad boys…

Years lat­er, this theme song played
in the drunk­en glow of the TV
as the name of your home­town appeared
on the screen and then,

the door of your boy­hood home
came into focus across the hood
of a police cruiser.
I turned and watched the blue light

spasm on the tar­nished brass
dis­em­bod­ied door knocker
rest­ing on my bookshelf,
bear­ing our surname —

giv­en to me after you died —
removed from your door,
the very same door on the TV screen,
fifty years earlier.

~

Ramblin’ Jim and Cow Having Eaten Up Canaletto

Jiří Kolář freed a cow
from a paint­ing with a scalpel,
put her out to pasture.

Her absence frames a famed
paint­ing of a Venice
canal by Canaletto.

Façades in shad­ow fill
her void­ed loins,
udder dark
with clus­tered gondolas.

A lone window
where the bridge of her nose was.
Ears now spread like an angel’s
wings perched on a parapet

against a blue sky. A resting
mast, occu­pies a front leg,
the X‑ray of a van­ished bone.

*

In a pho­to of my great-grandfather
and his trot­ter, Ramblin’ Jim,
the horse is in profile,
coat gleam­ing like wet ebony.

Jim’s Stygian shad­ow folded
into the fore­ground as if his image
had been cut from the dirt
of the Great Depression by Kolář’s blade,
hinged at the hooves,
and rotat­ed to the vertical —
my great-grand­fa­ther holding

the bri­dle of a paper horse
on the edge of an abyss.

~

The Hall of the Ambassadors — Distilled

O is for ever and for ever
round and windows
no God.

Ice over doors of the enemy,
fall under stars.

O praise, for ever.
O the tanks for ever,
nag with praise to God,
his wing on us, slam.

And there is no con. &
on the wind, our warlike
God over-endows.

And there is no con. &
on the way, in a trance,
flow ions in prose.

I remove all the effects
of these sentences,
from the Korán,—
I flee for refuge,
of the only¬

Niche left: —

By the ris­ing moon
she heweth him
with dark Heaven
and spread him
[in wicked piety],
there is no Deity
but ah!

*

The script is repeated.

~

The Inverted Parabolic Curve of a Dying Boy On a Dirt Bike

Willows carved in stone vie with winged skulls on gray-boned
slate. From the low light of the din­ing room, I watch
shad­ows flit and fold bleak faces into a cold
plate of scales. These ceme­tery wit­ness­es catch

sighs of muf­flers drift­ing past, bright below break-lights,
snow dyed red. Shy cherubs and long-toothed death’s‑head grins
dis­guise their joy as the cops read the boy last rites.
Now, I slow my stud­ies of the Sumerians,

aba­cus-beard­ed Assyrians and their dead
stares from the pages, moments ago the boy flashed
cal­lous­ness on his bike. Chased by cruis­er blues, dread

rose and a mail­box made him into a dying
flare that hit halfway up a tele­phone pole, dashed—
throes of death, brain swollen, four-stroke engine sighing.

~

Andrew McLellan holds an MFA in cre­ative writ­ing from Queens University of Charlotte. He was a vis­it­ing pro­fes­sor at both the University of Tennessee and UNC Charlotte where he taught archi­tec­tur­al stu­dio and history/theory sem­i­nars. His writ­ing and col­lages have been fea­tured in books and pub­li­ca­tions includ­ing Collage and Architecture (Routledge, 2013), Confabulations: Storytelling in Architecture (Ashgate, 2017), and the Journal of Architectural Education, 70:1 (March 2016). His poet­ry can be found in Temenos and MORIA.