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W.B. Keckler
Notes:
The
poems that seem (misleadingly) to consist of end-stopped
lines are poems playing and jamming with a form I first
encountered in the writings of Anne Carson, although I suppose
lineated differently they might owe as great a debt to (Vince
McMann voice here) the Mother of Us All, the Mistress of
Ellipsis and Abraxas of Parataxis, Queen Gertrude. They
are from a ms. tentatively
titled
My
Husband the Elegist.
The
winter poem probably grew out of a jealousy at the sempiternal
expertise of another poet (who shall remain nameless) at
writing good, hibernal poems.
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January,
a Month of Temptations
A crow's bone
throat peppers ears, throws Anglo-Saxon remnants.
Ice-needles
prick blood awake. Stroke it til Eye oozes Worm-Ichor.
A weeping willow
throws the I-Ching. Piano? Cage in Laughter.
Nature, ouroboros,
auto-fellates nature...Orgasm, Ellipsis, Being.
*
A weasel digests
a child's fresh heart, slinks home, ice-bellied.
A rise under
blue sheets for a wrong lover. Pounding snow. An Elan.
Shake off the
cartilage of these thoughts. "Eat shark daily," she whispers.
Something's
raw liver. Fin. Indurated sea-flesh.
A cuttlefish
has ejaculated ink in a cock's medulla.
*
What of this
lightproof chamber in your soul? "It's a thirsty cunnus hiding."
What hard raptor
waits to take it on-the-wing? "A little god comes through his
eyestalk."
Poplars knock
their antlers one hundred feet up. "I can't hear you crying
here."
One arm pruning
the other's lust. Shivas us. "And two new calmly entwine,
obscene,
banished,
blest."
______________________________________________________________
Celan
The dead man said.
Call them small tokens.
But the river water in his hair.
Had rusted all the words.
So they resembled.
Sabers.
500 years in entrails.
Taken out now.
Playing many violins.
For his parents.
Wedding.
______________________________________________________________
The Madwoman in My Old Neighborhood
Beside many cypresses.
A stone wall.
Through an iced window.
For miles we watch.
A woman walking away forgetting.
And I remembered.
The human femur I once found.
In a cemetery rather funny.
A groundhog had brought it up.
To clean his home.
She passes my story looking out.
My thinking window.
And the human femur.
Between us gleaming.
Is wet with.
Her snow.
I felt bad for telling.
The grave her name.
Her hope.
Was Else.
W.B.
Keckler's book, Sanskrit of the Body, won in the
National Poetry Series 2002. (It may be ordered online through
Amazon.com and many other online retailers.) His work has
appeared in numerous magazines here and abroad. He is also
a playwright.
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