The Skin of Meaning. Keith Flynn
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to see if the fates will hear our ode to joy,
we are given the sound of a man losing everything;
this is the hissing of his agitation, the sound of his
broken heart as it is given and fills with shards,
a piece of stone in an overgrown garden, a stiff,
bitter, life-long secrecy tipping over a robust
single indiscretion and no one is witness to the
villain, shaved to a shadow in that moment,
letting the sail of his love loose in a ripping wind
and that lost direction reducing his reflection to
a splinter as he spends his summer cutting down
the grass which grows right back and when the
colder weather comes to drive him down he trims
the fat of his summer words and their loose darkness
swims round his leather chair, the garden vines
emptied of tone, their edges’ innuendo snarling,
the hidden realities so carefully furrowed in shy
smiles and feigned deference which fasten his
fading future, slowly shot through with the wrinkles
of original meaning that he has never outgrown.
WHY PLUTO IS NO LONGER A PLANET
for Alan Moore
Of course, my belief
in culture is a sham.
I’m mining this shaft,
nourished on red velvet cake
and scrubbing the live walls
with a ShamWow that
I squeeze for emeralds
like a wizard on holiday.
Don’t ask me to explain.
It would only force you
to turn on a television.
There is an outcropping,
a bitter pill hanging onto
the cliff of the universe
like an old icy tooth.
It tastes of burlesque and
Aqua Velva, soft shoe
routines and bent spoons, went
the way of the Andromeda Strain.
Imagine an unnamed finger
grew out of the heel
of your hand and froze there.
ET IN ARCADIA EGO
When the trees bow
and bushes curtsy, as
the silk wind brushes
through my bramble-
cluttered garden, the
claws of the field mice
and piston-powered
rabbits scramble the
unbroken dirt, the
untended roses groan
under the weight of
their thorns, the
untethered tomato vines
sprawl and dump their
fire-red loads among
the robust weeds.
At one corner, Japanese
hornets have assembled
a gray colony the size
of a watermelon and
ward off semi-serious
excursions to pluck
a renegade bud or
puckered potato already
on the verge of rot.
A toxic black walnut
tree stands sentinel
at the leaning gate,
dropping its dark
grenades into the field’s
jumbled stalks. Two
squirrels quarrel over
which one should
command this wasted
circle first, the entire
acre fat on my neglect.
THE FORCE OF COMPASSION
Sit with things and listen long
and the singing will begin.
Turn your free fall into
a voluntary act. The song
shattered, every being
takes its piece of the harmony.
The well of the past is bottomless
and in the walls the song climbs
out of the nets and jewels of time,
the infinite unraveling mingled
with bitter intervals of radiance,
well water, lotus heart, rising crane.
THE HOUSE OF DANCE AND FEATHERS
You got to roll with it, or else you’ll roll
under it, says the piano player, roiling
the air with arpeggios. The genius is in
the second line, the one entranced and
in thrall to the drum, where the fierceness
of the soil is made manifest, its black mass
loosened by the rhythm of the water roots.
If Heaven is the place where nothing ever
happens, then the stomp and pomp takes
place elsewhere. Horses fear bridges
because of their binocular vision. Unable
to see straight in front of them, their
survival instincts have fashioned a 180
degree panorama in their peripheral scope,
with two realities constantly in play, like
the whale heads hanging on either side
of the Pequod’s stern, whom Melville
named Kant and Locke; our perception
is only narrowed when our brain feels
threatened. In Antelope Canyon, on
Navajo Land, Heaven is slotted in
the sandstone, and gossamer beams
of light compete with the waterfalls
to frame a vision of life after death.
The Crack and the Corkscrew spiral
out of the layered earth tones like a
pair of Dante’s hellish circles, where