A man who calls his workers niggers, at his basement

workbench late night, emery-buffing a brass pivot for his

mantle clock, my grandfather lights another Pall Mall,

knocking back Wild Turkey on ice. Remembering what he

had seen that morning, on the way to the plant, he uncaps a

permanent marker (that smell), squeaking five black letters

onto the calendar—S-W-A-N-S—recording their sheet-white 

arrival like he does every fall.

In this new prose poetry series, Mark McCaig holds up the lamp to family and passions, and reports back to us in a voice at once tremulous and crystalline. His birderwatcher’s Lifelist becomes flexible metaphor, and a kind of universal doorway.

Two nightjars bedevil the darkness, their churring trills a form

of demand, filling the black around the country streetlamp’s

cone of light, inspiring Plath, sleepless again, to kick off her

covers and write Goatsucker, her page incandescent.