Category: Poetry

Someone has stolen the mannequins

From the dress shop window,

Though thieves did not break in,

And according to police,

No one forced the door.

The owner of the shop

Works solely with his wife;

Surely they are innocent.

Small village , main street,

Mary, the Mother of God displayed

In half buried bathtubs…

O mannequin rapture!

Dusk comes early

To the faded storefronts.

S.K.

I wasn’t one of those who believed in the end of days.

I gave a butterfly my fingertip.

I was sweaty, loving, crude, open, honest, and bookish.

I didn’t just "believe" in the Bill of Rights,

I wove my clothing from its threads.

I held the kelson of creation and a dying man

And knew they are the same.

I saw the constitution of the living and of the dead

And knew they are the same.

Sometimes in the sweetness of a summer’s hour

I held the face of the man I loved

And I held the face of the woman I loved

For all faces are divine

Reposed in the ardor

Of the sky.

What did I tell you anyway?

Poems hold so tightly to everything, everyone–

There is no good time to go.

These leaves know nothing

But light and dark

And how to live.

S.K.

Summer Hymn

–             -after the Finnish of Pentti Saarikoski

1.

I took the long path to the ocean

I had old songs in mind oak trees stood out like people who have come home

& walking I saw it was a folk tale I knew I was crossing a bridge of shadows

& love me or not I said & yellow flowers what are they

(I didn’t know)

2.

as a boy I worked for many months to starve myself the summer I watched the scouts lower the flag & the hospital settled into night. those boys folded Old Glory like Marines I was at the window: 17 and maybe a hundred pounds

a doctor from Ghana asked me what I was singing.

I said it was the holy art of dying for two voices.

I was anorexic smarty pants

3.

we die in summer even though the last thing we see is ice on the pond

& we live again in summer though we can’t explain

4.

the lame God used to live really live sailed up the Nile got dirt on his hands.

his feet were soft metal, gold, imperfect

today, early june

I lay my head down in the temple of the god

Hermes Endendros

first god withered

first broken in the high branches

first god of summer…

                     –in memory of my mother

S.K.

There are mountains where no one sees another man or woman for years.

Such places enter mythologies and then the frail mind

Populates the real mountains with imagined parliaments.

Psychologists can’t explain it. Anthropologists

Say we cannot imagine emptiness in sacred or profane forests …

I think this is just a matter of the tongue:

When we’re alone we talk to ourselves

And that’s that.

And then, there’s my old mother with her arms full of pine cones

Where formerly there was nothing

And where soon enough there will be autumn rain…

S.K.

The following “prose poem” is from my book in progress
entitled “Mornings With Borges” which will be published by Copper Canyon Press
in the Fall of 2010 if we are still holding our own on this mad planet. Like most
of the poems in the book this is about being lost in multiple and oddly
productive ways.

S.K.

Helsinki, Labyrinth, 1982

I got lost in the library last night and like most blind
people I touched walls and the spines of books.

“Hey Borges,” I said to myself, “Where do I find the entrance to Uqbar?”

(When I was a kid I used to climb in secret on the roof and sleep up there.)

So lost as I was, I pulled a book from a shelf and held it like a royal pillow.

I saw I was full of utility

Like a designer of fountains

Who does his best work in winter.

It was Frank O Hara pointed out

You could just as well use the phone

As write poetry—solo instruments

Being equal. Bell, A.G.

Discovered the telephone

Hoping to find a machine

For the deaf—his bride

Couldn’t hear him;

Think of that first gizmo

As a sort of love poem…

I wish most days

I could describe how the phone works.

About poetry

We have all said too much—

The best of us know

We shouldn’t try to explain things

Now Spring has come.

S.K.

When I was twelve years old and you were seventeen the poet Ed Sanders tried to levitate the Pentagon by chanting. He had tons of help. Robert Lowell was there; Norman Mailer; Allen Ginsberg…and approximately ten thousand young and old people who were fed up with the military industrial complex. The crowd chanted the names of all the gods and goddesses they could think of. "Help us,Gods and Goddesses," they cried. They danced and wept and begged the divinities to spirit the Pentagon from the Earth. And they went home disappointed. And nowadays no one is singing or chanting in this country.

Citizens still protest, of course. There are websites. People occasionally march in the streets. But unless I am mistaken no one dresses in red feathers and calls on Hermes to turn the brutal engines of Capitalism into straw.

I hereby resolve to shake a homemade amulet and dance in a field of soybeans. I won’t worry about the neighbors. I have just enough irony to be sincere and winningly unscientific, which is to say, I remain philosophically hopeless, Confucian as always…

S.K.