ABOUT

CONTENTS

EDITORIAL

ARCHIVE

LAGNIAPPE

MAST

SUBMISSIONS

 
TWO POEMS
by Gary Keenan

Abecedary

Avowing being, one chooses speech,
Bedizening the moment with figured
Culprits of poetry writ
Devoutly for throngs
Ensanguined by past lusts,
Fistulous as Pascal's sentient reed yet
Gruff with thoughts to murder thought.
Harlot or goddess, the muse finds
Indecorous that which defiles the body.
Jasmine blooming by crumbling walls;
Kithara droning a blind man's
Limpid threnody; the lunar
Meniscus a scythe raised against
Nebulous heaven: there's no accounting for what lasts --
Oneness must be fatal to consciousness,
Perhaps we all end as cooling light, theory a liquor
Quenching rasher truths
Rampaging through the body: that poetry is
Strigil to the social dermis; that
Torpor afflicts the artless; that while
Usance yields meaning, misreadings seed use.
Vagrant tongues may offer blissful kisses yet be
Weevils to the bolls we'd spin-did
Xanadu dream of Coleridge or vice versa? "Late, late
Yestreen I saw the new Moon/with the old moon in her arms," quoth he, and what
Zephyrs his verses still suspire; would we do as well.



Aubade

The silver mist
settled
in blue spruce

will be
gone before anyone
knows how

I woke beside
you in the dark
and kissed

you awake
and asleep again
then lay

with my fingers
in your hair and
dreamed

a death for you
a flat rock
in the Weir River

for your pyre
and hundreds
of blue herons

shaking their beaks
at black smoke curled
toward the sun