That Green Exchange

By March I've put away my Bach
and now I spend a morning in the sun
sorting through the disks for some
more subtle sounds: so I stack
Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty off to the side—
too familiar and much too much a waltz
and Vivaldi's Four Seasons—too obvious, of course.

In this pause—as when between movements you hear
musicians shifting anxiously on their chairs
as if the orchestra were clearing its throat—
I begin to hear “drop, drop, drop,”
a metronome of icicles, weeping from the eaves.
They seem to quicken the air and tease
from this winter scene a sense of spring.

Then, I come, almost by chance,
to Mozart's piano concerto number six,
a lively gift conceived by a youth, almost a boy
in truth, whose death at thirty-five
must have seemed a fantasy too remote
to contemplate, there at the beginning,
in that quick moment, that green exchange.

McKenna's poetry and creative nonfiction has appeared in more than 30 literary journals and mainstream magazines including Ideals Magazine, Hawaii Review, Midwest Quarterly, Louisville Review, Chaminade Literary Review, Concho River Review, and ELM. His poem "At the Japanese Gardens" was nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

McKenna teaches contemporary literature and creative nonfiction at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.