Fear
After a line by Rilke
The trees in their bad
penmanship
scratch at the windows
of my room,
and I have aged for
nothing, afraid
again. So I think of
the hallway clock
to which my father kept
the key.
Face to face with the
clock
and its floating black
hands, he wound
it up one night. My
mother set a glass
of milk on the table.
The clock stood
unflinching like a
punished child.
As in a ritual for
which I was no
initiate, the clock
began to tick.
It was my mother’s
birthday. The milk
as still as marble. My
father sat down
at his place, very
quietly.
Anthropology
For
the English, E of the silent variety.
For the French, the E of diacritical stress,
the
small beret it wears to the left angle
sometimes to the right.
For
the Spanish it became about consistency,
a middle sound, half opened mouth.
For
the German the sudden unkinking
in the hose of the throat.
For
one walks away with more appreciation
of the E, one considers how the body
is
translated in particular by it, the
uninterrupted flat line only broken up
by
consonants. There was the man
whose mother was set fire to in Poland
and
who, to keep himself from wailing, went on
to write a novel that forbade the letter E.
Is
there a thread that holds the story
if the story is cruel, or if the story
is
a woof of separate stories? What is the story
of E? Chess of being, no end game.
Night of the
Death of Seeger,
Trades Union
Hall, Melbourne
As blows the cloods heelster gowdie ow’r the bay,
we sing, so like the
infant’s sounds,
who tries to sing with
us. He sits and mouths
atop his mother’s skirt
and she sings to the boy,
his father drunk, the
“Freedom Come All Ye,”
the man’s song only
spit and ululation.
As blows the cloods heelster gowdie ow’r the bay,
she sings, about bad
weather, one bad season
and the little baby,
small Osiris,
rides in the canoe the
skirt makes of her thighs,
As blows the cloods heelster gowdie ow’r the bay,
where he floats through
the world’s great glen,
not knowing his own
life, aware of no crisis,
his song the gurgle
sound of G—G—G,
first sound on earth, all spit and ululation.
David Keplinger's five collections include Another City
(Milkweed, 2018) and The Most Natural Thing (New Issues, 2013). The recipient of
two fellowships from the NEA, the Colorado Prize, the T.S. Eliot Prize, and the
Cavafy Prize, Keplinger teaches at American University in Washington DC.
