Issue 2:2 | Poetry | Keith Flynn
3 Poems |
 |
|
A
Poem In The Shape Of Tulsa (for Ron Padgett)
Reading these remarkable Translations of Reverdy And stuck for Two weeks in stinking Oklahoma Her panhandle a paradox acrostic Like a handshake turned into a karate chop Oklahoma still likes Ike Still makes rooms big enough To house a horse Accidents here are emulsions Negotiating the Stairways of desire Second generation parachutes Rally round the family In the middle of the road In the matrix of America’s Bizarre cultural breakdowns And nothing is lost Things are more like they are now Than they ever were Like poor Tulsa long dead Choked on oil cash and gun flow The ghosts from 1921 Sliding through the side streets Like greased mannequins Mocha babies in their arms Moaning no |
Tarheels
In North
Carolina, hogs outnumber people,
And we can
lay claim to more paved roads
Per capita
than any other state in the nation,
Unrolling
beside an ocean of nitrogen-rich
Swine manure
fed locally by back to back
Hurricanes
from formerly unheralded
Waste lagoons.
Swimming nonchalantly
Through
the murky brown terrain are algae
Blooms no
fish can face unarmed. Why I
Daresay
we could skim more phosphorous
From a laketop
with a net than most marine
Biologists
could squeeze from a tube of
Toothpaste
on a bet. As for tobacco, how
Soon they
forget, we just made a smokeless
Nicotine
delivery system called Eclipse,
A gentleman’s
cigarette that refuses its
Information
to be assimilated second hand,
Fewer nasty
cancers to litigate, you understand.
Yessiree
Jesse, (whose own pig valve keeps
His ventricles
alert), we love our hogs,
(the other
white meat), but we keep our
priorities straight. NC is a cigarette state.
Welsh Fantasia
For
Menna and Nigel
Who can
know what someone else believes?
Only mystery
enables us to live.
Cartographers
of the human heart, children
Acquire
language to tell the stories that are
Already
within them. The story of the bee,
Its transient
history, is spread across
Tal Garreg’s
yellow slopes, among fritillary
Butterflies,
somber circling ox and glacial
Pingo
holes. It’s that time of Spring when
The lambs
are big enough to resist the fox,
Stretching
their new legs round and round
In the
harp-shaped field, where generations
Of poets
have stopped to observe a disappointed
Kite,
their nests filled with music. Donald Evan,
Dewi Emrys,
Sarnicol, watching cricket at sunset
In Llandysul
or Robert Southey in his vicar’s
Cottage,
lugging his manuscripts and table up
The cliffs
of Rhossili, rocks on the pages to keep
Them stiff,
golden laburnum burning in his brain.
The urge
to resist sifts through the Welsh soul
Like a
sandstone farandola of strange proportions,
A stichomythic
ball of trembling justice,
Soft-spoken
and inexhaustible. The DNA
Of Frank
Lloyd Wright was filled with this
Unitarian
architecture, this slate and coal covered
And fired
every home in the world, aloft on the sea
That lashes
this coast, the way a whip violates its
Target
and remains free, tufts trailing silent and
Suspended
into bouquets of white ice, frozen sails
Tilting
homeward in the winter distance.
One of
life’s clear characteristics is its utter
Unpredictability
and the pilgrim hunger for
A mythology
to cling to, like Dylan raging against
The green
fuse that drives the flower dying
In the
light or Anne Taliesin who passed in 1903,
Who lost
three children in infancy and sleeps
Beneath
a gentle wash of poetry.
The red
beech is beseeching her spotted rotting
Grave
and so fades a summer cloud away,
So sinks
the gale when storms are o’er,
So gently
shuts the eye of day and dies
A wave
along the shore. A red rock marks
The spot
where my soul stopped to rest,
In the
midst of life we are cradled, safe
And still
rocking in the ample arms of death.
A faltering
spark, I followed Gillian Clarke
Through
thorny gorse, five fields smelling
Of coconut,
shadowed by young oaks, bluebells,
And a
family of sleeping badgers, obdurate
In their
earthen motel. Black-faced sheep
Watched
us, mumbling among themselves,
Some already
shorn, bucking and shivery
In their
new paint, wading in the whispered edge
Of the
little stream whisking toward its junket
With the
Teifi River, whose towering honor
Circles
where it stays, like an unfinished ice
Sculpture
melting in the open street in Cardiff
And a
blonde child admiring it, standing strangely
On his
toes, wrapped in a long beam of sunlight
In which
small particles of dust swam in haloes.
A young
poet named Helga raised her face in Trinity
Out of
the wind and rust and small talk and asked me,
“How easy is it to define a country by
its margins?”
Or for
blood to crawl, I think, mapling in the branches
Of her
body toward poetry. Being marginalized myself,
I skirted
the issue, in keeping with the Welsh custom
Of answering
every question with a story. All our own
Traditions
are unlearned as we travel. I hid from young
Helga
behind the microphone which was still smeared
With lipstick
from my breathy introduction. I almost
Licked
it off, but sidestepped, dreamed of R. S. Thomas
In his
goblin gardens singing, wandering among the ruined
Castles
that hold the plaques of the past, against which
The poets
are blindly writing, straggling into the new
Country
with the old one strapped on their backs.
