Jeff Whitney
Kismet
Sing heaven and sing it twice.
An honest-to-god butterfly
might land in your palm.
What then will you say? Miracle?
Music? The dead grasshopper
makes music. The sunken ship on fire
is music. There are ten theories about everything
and nine of them are a barn on fire.
The existence of a map means little
without the existence of the place.
What we have in common is the dead.
What we have in common isn’t misery
it’s a mountain where the gods live
picking favorites, stroking millipedes.
And so what if we are conduits
of gloom, if we are both house and savage
wind. We gloom and it is our gloom, our dust
in the teeth, our children limp commas
in the ground. Memory of fire becoming
the memory of ash. There is always a barn on fire.
And yes there are monsters. What we do
to stay alive. How we say I’m leaving
soon. A priest bleeding alone for hours under stars
recites the names of saints in little cloud puffs
of cold breath. Disappear, pretty bastards...
How does the song go? We know
how the song goes. We know
what silence is for. We started every fire.
*
A flock of wild turkeys goes
wherever it wants. Onto highways
touching county lines, feeling
the yellow grass finger
their necks. A person looks
in the window of a butcher hoping
to see some brutal thing but finds
people dancing curtains across
the floor. The world is only whales
in the deep. The world keeps trying
to make its song. Ghosts wend through trees
and clink on chime. All this and nobody
brought a camera. All this and you
trying to make a song. Take away the body
and what is left is the fact of a person
burning. A bowling alley after dark.
The train and what the train leaves
behind. A person might say
the world is only a series of razors
but animals who invented sharp
know there is nothing in the end
that isn’t.
Jeff Whitney is the author of The Tree With Lights in it, available from Thrush Press, while Radio Silence (Black Lawrence Press) and Smoke Tones (Phantom Books) were co-written with Philip Schaefer. His poems have appeared in journals such as Beloit, Blackbird, Narrative, Poetry Northwest, and Verse Daily. He lives in Portland, where he teaches English.
Return to July 2016 Edition
Sing heaven and sing it twice.
An honest-to-god butterfly
might land in your palm.
What then will you say? Miracle?
Music? The dead grasshopper
makes music. The sunken ship on fire
is music. There are ten theories about everything
and nine of them are a barn on fire.
The existence of a map means little
without the existence of the place.
What we have in common is the dead.
What we have in common isn’t misery
it’s a mountain where the gods live
picking favorites, stroking millipedes.
And so what if we are conduits
of gloom, if we are both house and savage
wind. We gloom and it is our gloom, our dust
in the teeth, our children limp commas
in the ground. Memory of fire becoming
the memory of ash. There is always a barn on fire.
And yes there are monsters. What we do
to stay alive. How we say I’m leaving
soon. A priest bleeding alone for hours under stars
recites the names of saints in little cloud puffs
of cold breath. Disappear, pretty bastards...
How does the song go? We know
how the song goes. We know
what silence is for. We started every fire.
*
A flock of wild turkeys goes
wherever it wants. Onto highways
touching county lines, feeling
the yellow grass finger
their necks. A person looks
in the window of a butcher hoping
to see some brutal thing but finds
people dancing curtains across
the floor. The world is only whales
in the deep. The world keeps trying
to make its song. Ghosts wend through trees
and clink on chime. All this and nobody
brought a camera. All this and you
trying to make a song. Take away the body
and what is left is the fact of a person
burning. A bowling alley after dark.
The train and what the train leaves
behind. A person might say
the world is only a series of razors
but animals who invented sharp
know there is nothing in the end
that isn’t.
Jeff Whitney is the author of The Tree With Lights in it, available from Thrush Press, while Radio Silence (Black Lawrence Press) and Smoke Tones (Phantom Books) were co-written with Philip Schaefer. His poems have appeared in journals such as Beloit, Blackbird, Narrative, Poetry Northwest, and Verse Daily. He lives in Portland, where he teaches English.
Return to July 2016 Edition