Best American Poetry Blog

Reb Livingston Presents a Poem by Shane McCrae

In No Place


And we divorced in any anyhow / But sudden anyhow

but hurry we    / Divorced in sudden     hurry the affair / Become the main thing don't

want to be mar- / ried still become the main thing anyhow

Already sit and don't go out

in an- / y sudden every sudden thing     and we

In any hurry turn to salt and break      / The farther I

run far from you     the less / I feel my own body

and turn to salt     / and break     and hurry have

to get now back / Home to Chicago every sudden thing / Marries

already there's no money left

And we divorced in anyhow the eyes

Except the eyes eyes     turn to lime-

stone in their sockets and the eyes

go also numb / And any hurry hurries home     and once

I had a lover and a lover and a fine

Lover I had a lover and she was mine

As lost as sudden suddenly

The woods behind my house are trees

In no place

every time I touch you I feel less

Of my own body fingertips and wrists     / Elbows and shoulders strange

to feel the numb- / ness as a tingling as an extra burst

Of life to signal something dying

hur- / ry the affair become     the main thing hur-

ry any anyhow become your home

Is anyhow your home and have you ever

had another / And wander through the woods     and make the forts / Made

of stripped trees     my forts / As sure as my

body is mine as sure

The trees would either way

bend but to strip them first

Is mine if I am in it is / And have I have I ever ever have

Is anyhow my home and have I ever / And have I ever every sudden thing

In every sudden thing I look for you

And that is how I look for you

Bend but to strip them

ladders hanging from the trees

But first we had to choose the tree     and clear the hives / From the tree


but first we had to climb

* * *

Shane McCrae is the author of One Neither One (Octopus Books) and Mule (forthcoming, Cleveland State University Poetry Center).  

No Tell Motel first published the "In No Place" in April 2009.  Shane wrote, "I don't write free verse poems—mostly because I can't. But I am interested in the musical effects achievable with free verse . . .my attempts to create a meter that is simultaneously formal and free, and to think, for musical purposes, at the level of the verse paragraph rather than the line. As a consequence, the metrically important unit is the verse paragraph—e.g., a traditional sonnet has seventy feet (5 feet per line x 14 lines), and since what matters when writing in this way is the total number of feet (and, of course, the poems do rhyme, though some of the rhymes are very slant, and don't follow a regular pattern), individual line lengths can vary, so long as the thing has 70 feet at the end. "In No Place," for instance, is made up of three sonnets, or 210 feet. Where a line "ends" metrically is denoted by a "/" if that point falls anywhere other than the actual end of a line, and generally where each new line "begins" metrically is denoted with a capital letter (the only exception being when a line begins mid-word)."