From which, when it is struck, I hear myGrandfather’s voice, the man I calledMy father my whole life, my child- hood, long, my life from when From after they, my mother’s fatherMy mother’s mother, took me, bor-rowed me away forever, for A weekend visit. They Said they would bring me back. They toldMy father they would bring me backBut they were white, and he was black And centuries of would I hear him when the drum is struckA wolf’s skin stretched across the drumMy mother’s father, mine, and from The sound in pain, as him- self stretched on the drum, as his own skinFlattened across the bottomlessBlack of its mouth, as he would dis- appear in the blackness, on The next strike disappear. But IHear only screaming, only suf-fering. I hear no music, though I strike and strike and strike
A Wolf’s Skin Stretched Across a Drum
[I]t is said that a sheep-skin stretched over adrum will not give forth any sound whenstruck if a wolf’s hide on another drum issounding at the same time.—René Descartes (tr. by Walter Robert)
Feature Date
Series
Selected By
Share This Poem
Print This Poem
“A Wolf’s Skin Stretched Across a Drum” is from Two Appearances after the Resurrection.
Copyright © 2025 by Shane McCrae.
The poem appears with the permission of Omnidawn Publishing.
All rights reserved.
Shane McCrae’s most recent full-length book of poetry is New and Collected Hell (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025), and his most recent chapbooks are Two Appearances After the Resurrection (Omnidawn, 2026) and Songs and Sonnets (Broken Sleep Books, 2025). He has edited a volume of John Berryman’s uncollected Dream Songs, titled Only Sing (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025). McCrae’s awards include a Lannan Literary Award and a Whiting Writer’s Award, and he has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts. He lives in New York City and teaches at Columbia University.
Richmond, California
McCrae’s latest collection considers the nature of perception and experiments with form and punctuation.
This is a book about perceiving and being perceived. The various subjects of these poems are viewed by an artist, a devil, a soul floating out of a body it had inhabited, a god fed up with her husband’s infidelities, and a father whose young child has COVID-19. The poems of Two Appearances After the Resurrection are haunted by the question of what one ought to do with their perceivability.
After a decade of publishing poems almost exclusively utilizing no punctuation aside from the slash, Shane McCrae began including semi-regular punctuation in his 2023 book, The Many Hundreds of the Scent. He continues that project in Two Appearances After the Resurrection. Here, he further explores the consequences—especially the rhythmical consequences—of the change. Throughout these poems, McCrae perceives and implicitly considers his own shifting approaches to writing.
Poetry Daily Depends on You
With your support, we make reading the best contemporary poetry a treasured daily experience. Consider a contribution today.
