Pardon
The road away lifts like a kite and catches
in a gust of morning. Something small, someone
lost, could ride on that kite and flutter sunward.
My eyes are in the maples – no longer bound
by lid and bone. They are owls that didn’t
blink at the corona of another day.
Light tilts to fill a hollow, to open me
to blue. This pang is at the nerve of each
new feather that prays to the wind.
What saves me is the buoy of air. I am a child
on a shoulder she knows. The road sways
to that old step; it rises to the tug of my string.
Melanie McCabe is the author of four books of poems, most recently the forthcoming All The Signs Were There, which won the Longleaf Press Poetry Prize. Her debut novel Road Longer Than Memory will be out from Oceanview Publishing in June of 2026. Her memoir, His Other Life: Searching For My Father, His First Wife, and Tennessee Williams, won the 2016 University of New Orleans Press Prize.
Amethyst Review 