The Innisfree Poetry Journal www.innisfreepoetry.org by Michael Gessner
Keening the Shades
It was the Celtic bards whoSonglines The dogs are keening again tonight. They’ve come out from their domestic homes, into their backyards on the ridge over the wild valley to sympathize with the coyotes, who are also keening, as if in unison they will bring back lost ancestors, a pack with greater power than their own, a plaintive communal longing, without evidence of a kill. Ghostings The ghosts of memory are in the wailings, just as the moon-ghost pulls the tides out and in, just as the hermit of history keens too for the shapes that emerge from rain and in the mists of rain, umbrae from starlight, o the ghosts are dancing tonight, ghosts of chance and excess, compromise and reluctance, and when wind and rain cease, they cease also. Nominals The ghosts of history appear to reappear in abandoned school hallways still polished by song, in the shades of a blood-red moon, and the ghosts of our longings drift over sunsets and moonsets— the gliding in and the gliding out— in nominals, over the vascular tunics of luminous eyes, over the rainbows of the heart and through the heart in its rain. Misanthrope
after a visit to Tor HouseAcrimony is a crow squawking over an empty stone house, circling & circling all day long, & tho’ it’s been fed, its body strong, & its flight made easy by complaint thermals, & by every account, it is complete, it continues to circle & squawk over an empty stone house. Copyright 2006-2012 by Cook Communication |