Dirk McDermott

Fellow Scout who could climb and touch 
the gold ball at the top of the flagpole, 
and do math three grades ahead 
under his crewcut. I need a calculator 
to figure how long since I spoke his name.
How long since I offered my own blue
neckerchief to wipe his always runny nose.
But last night in smoke, steam, and rain
beside a wrecked train I told him how happy 
I felt in the igloo we’d built, how handsome 
a cub he’d been crawling on all fours
up the twilit tunnel to me. In a hoarse 
whisper and never looking at his face.

Copyright © 2023 by Patrick Donnelly. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on March 9, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“Poems may arise from dreams, but when it comes to writing a poem based on a dream, I find it most interesting to leave it unclear whether we’re actually in a dream, or some other kind of altered state, or whether ordinary life has suddenly slipped into one of its less realistic episodes. In the end, I’m not sure those states are substantially different, given how our most intense feelings and memories shape what we see of the world, and what we think it means.”
—Patrick Donnelly