Richard Kenney

1 As so-called quarks, so atoms before and through And after molecules, which too Constitute us awhile, pluming Through our slowly changing shapes Like beachscapes Through a duneless sandglass, say (I said, once) — all these So utterly forgetful, wiped clean As numbers with each new use, lint-free. How not so words, which pass our minds And mouths and ears from hind- Most elsewhere, on their way to elsewhere — why So? Words are the sum of their histories: rose And roke and no and blanketing snow. 2 So much less LEGO-like, click- Click together than like slick Tentacular Colonial hydrozoans tossed Together in the copper pots Of   predication — all cross- Shock and shimmery tangle — How can Anyone calculate semantic Sets so dervishly complex? How can we not expect not less but hellish Much more than to mean what we say? Then guess: How can we better but Hope to become in sum what We say when we say again love?

in Riddles, for Mary * How many suns will cross its coign before the last freeze? What pennywhistle spun its point on the glass breeze? Whose airs are loosened in the pane like miniature degrees, where breath condenses into rain among the apple trees? Here tesserae have turned to earth, here blossoms may attend to birth as sun becoming leaves; here branches seem to lead the glass, whose scenes compose as seasons pass, the lifetime, piece by piece.... A sphere * Begins and ends: suppose, as glaciers drop their catch, as memory’s a ragged seine, as grain by grain a dead morraine the sky is softly sifting ash, as constellations each rescind to embers, umbral lees—alas, the crown lens will surely tear to end the long, sweet refrain of sun to moon to sun again, of E from M C2— and then what breath once shaped the pane may lose itself (we pray) in airs our children, too, had breathed in time, and theirs, and theirs. * If oracles recall in riddles orreries in orreries, the quantum of the apple’s arc the piper’s tune, the dancer’s turning crown of sonnets in the dark by starlight ground between the querns spun withershins of dawn and dusk to wreathe a green and weathered earth— it’s moonshine, love, and loneliness. Do looney jigs unwind the suns? Might jugglers drop them every one? Are seeds resewn, or tales respun? When pipers stop to play the bones the very stones are left undone. * To please the Sphinx all life unreels through black magnetic stone-strewn fields where pitchblende blinks its slow decay tic-tic-tic de-lightedly by alpha, beta, gamma, delta— time dilates and starlight bends in gravity like roundelays. All light, partic- ulate, licks out one way, in waves; electric clouds expand in spheres whose uncracked shells concentrically unrecalled across the parsecs and the years ring out, shift red (like Hell), disperse the edges of the universe— * Eclectic quarks a dish collects to parse into initial text— miraculous, exotic sky!— a Book of Kells whose quirkish tale in optical if stale effects is mirrored in the lemur’s eye, as through the hatchling’s candled egg comes first light to the cockerel— As Sol dissolves against the clock, and seismographic needles track, and continents incline to raft, uranium sines off to lead or raindrops pock a full carafe to lilypads inside the head— * Assymmetries: no wave contracts—

Sky a shook poncho. Roof   wrung. Mind a luna moth Caught in a banjo. This weather’s witty Peek-a-boo. A study in Insincerity. Blues! Blooms! The yodel Of   the chimney in night wind. That flat daffodil. With absurd hauteur New tulips dab their shadows In water-mutter. Boys are such oxen. Girls! — sepal-shudder, shadow- Waver. Equinox. Plums on the Quad did Blossom all at once, taking Down the power grid.

Touch swollen tonsils: gill slits. Inside eyelid: slimelight. Cheek: shark. Here foreknown I’ve dived down dawnless microbial snows, phosphor blue to blue- black, to black. I fend fish. I find the saffron curb of   the sulfur vent, veering voiceless again into the segmented, swaying, white, toothed tube- worm, Time.