Flirtations with the Language
Carson Kahn
“Poems aren’t for teaching; they insinuate.” —McLane
The Bookbinder
The entrails of an evening storm
groan like the bowels of a sunken Spanish ship,
festering beneath the ocean foam.
Gilded doubloons glisten like stars,
waiting to be wished upon,
waiting to be found.
Teeming, steaming with the thousand scents of a leatherbound tome,
the entrails of an evening storm moan—
hauling, heaving themselves away like half-dead men
sulking, soaking on the battlefields of Rome,
shackled in the thousand yellowing pages of a leatherbound tome—
never to be seen,
never to go home.
As evening fades to night and night to dreams,
the entrails of an evening storm fade too, outshone.
Tucked beneath a rippling sea of city lights…
You gaze upon the candles of the skyline,
a thousand worlds apart the grapes of Spain and Rome.
But in the sky are those whose wicks will never be extinguished by an evening storm,
dancing like the flotsam of a galley’s hull,
glistening, glistering like the gilded corners
of a thousand, letherbound tomes.
Overseas
A 21-gun solute to
the fresh faces of
the cannon fodder, and to
their lusty mistresses,
ladies Liberty and Luck, might
like burning bridges 21 by 21,
Do as much.
Epistle
To the Anachronist,
You vague supplication with a plastic face,
You school of thought, of pewter flounders
virtue priced and Calico-caught,
wrapped in news and swapped for pennies at the bazaar in Ankara:
You will not stand in those winds which blow
when the law’s cut down and we’ve seen Godot,
for success is but where dreams off to die
when the cast die’s die-cast in steel
and the faces turn up short of six at five.
Like Atlas twixt a rock and a hard place,
or Medusa in le mise en abyme,
You vague supplication with a plastic face
are stocked among Ye Olde Shoppe’s crop’s cream—
among those tinderboxes and the bourbon never bought,
and other faltering flounders,
virtue-priced and Calico-caught.
Regards,
The Unregarded
Retrieve
Do you recall an era when we could be strangers in a strange world?
Do you remember a time before you met someone before meeting them?
Do you recollect our dalliances with the abrupt?
…
Do you have it in mind, or have you stored it on your hard drive?
Anadyomene
As soft she lifts the mollusk’s shell,
As shy a pearl peeps slight atop the brim,
So stirs sterling Selene on the horizon,
So lays a lace of quiet stars o’er Theia’s breast,
And under argent sway, so swells the sea.
Mad Men
They shout it at us from the rooftops of a roofless world,
as if there are so many you could hide a Ceiling underneath.
They compel us with Armantrout’s “old magic”—
he says it doesn’t work now;
I begin counting the smokestacks:
it’s all hard-set vintage shadows to me.
Like an impression of impressionnistes soviétiques or deco marks,
lofty lettering for the lofty goals of lofty copy
(vaulted ascenders on the Ns; Voltaire’s the face)
in columns, stands fast and woodcut and Empire Stately,
but all the glitz is neon, shone through glass and leaf of gold,
and sadly, it is just “nice to be reminded of it”
once in an after all.
Fenland
I regard the twisted carcass
of a Cornish Oak with pity:
echo of reverence,
herald of last legs.
Gnarled by her eld,
she wiles away the moons
alone among the umber mire.
Only a bullfrog, bister and forlorn as she,
marks the lapse of moments with a croak
that echoes into requiem.
Rent in the figure of a broken soul,
she shudders with a widow’s primal groan
in Southern winds (dirgeful duet of drones).
The sage’s shivers beckon sleep:
her knotted shadows creep
to trail’s end…
It is only in the rose-gold alpenglow of Sunrise
that the beauty of an ancient, operatic Mourning
is unearthed.
The Stoic’s Cry
O’er the Age of Reason has
an otherworldly silence fallen.
Of sweet science? Sycophancy,
by this silence, it has stolen!
Wisdom once much luminous,
has designed to all but disappear.
The point draws near
that all is lost;
now we are fraught
with Times of Fear.
On Writing On
A Miscellany of Wry Versifications, Devil’s Advocacy
& the Occasional Dadaesque Bon Mot, in Eight Parts
IWords on gridded paper
are implements of city planning.
Not just where the Johnson’s live,
but in what sense they ought to.
Vulgar instruments, really.
IILanguage, bloody business.
Use it too perfectly and you can see the next move
like the “stratagem” (lurches) of a newbie sabreur.
Sometimes it grazes your temple
and then you get your heart torn out by the point
(if you haven’t up and sleeved it already)—
and then what good’s there in’t?
IIIEffusive. No one ever got anywhere
by bleeding all over the floor.
Ech, that was obvious.
At least Diogenes doesn’t care.
Ech, that was obvious.
IVKamienska’s beautifully written text on
Szczepanski’s beautifully written text on
the Parthenon, and on hating
beautifully written texts.
I hate beautifully written texts,
she writes (I quote).
I hate beautifully written texts.
VApple juice: what you’d have if you put New York through a Mixmaster.
Sometimes I think,
and then I think, what an awful thought.
And then I think, what an awful thought.
VIIt seems they took my music…!
Well, I didn’t do this for you.
Indeed, they keep telling me
“irregardless” isn’t a word!
Invaluable advice, really.
VIIHow intriguing that the terms
hoi polloi and hoity toity
should be so similar
(even concomitant, as concomitants go)
and yet, so unkin…
On another note: MONKEYBARS ↘
ƃuıƃuɐɥ
VIIITo bring it full circle:
I have never once found the right word,
but I savor ambiguity, abstraction,
phonetics, and the brief.
At the very least and most, it’s enough to get by.
The Seeress
She rests amidst the other shadows
of an olive grove beside the brook,
the gray arm of the wind through her hair
as through reeds.
I ask her how she sees the great Empyrean…
She says it blooms rich like a bluebell on the eve,
gleams delicate like the eyes of a babe with gifts aplenty
for this and other worlds.
And I ask of her how she sees the great Empyrean,
and she says blind of sight, not of mind, born to seek.
And she melts into the river as petals into wind,
and drifts away.
Fahrenheit 450
A slaty roofscape crumbles as
the acrid furnace chokes and tumbles,
smothering the motley hovels
on our upturned district's southern fringe.
Smolder speeds this city's molder;
still the memorizers shoulder
freedom's burden as their scolders
watch them burn and on their passions binge.
This ragtag band of discontents
travails here, and covenants
the sinews of insurrectionary intent
insinuated in a caustic broth of schemes.
Just watch, till sacred sanctum's won
they'll battle with their books, their guns,
but nothing of their clash will come
for freedom's fight is not 1 that redeems.
My deepest thanks. —C