Rodney Koeneke

Whose voice to have called you And brought you to breathing So mute as you tarry, Enclosed in career? Whose thoughts aren’t like your thoughts But strips of bright Silver, bringing you constants On dead twisting paths Till words couldn’t keep you Collected in hours Advanced in a body Confused with the grass To show us by falling More reasons for leaving Thought’s office to leave you Asleep without fear

I am a girl who sees the world in everything. I wonder in a 100 years if the world will just flip. I upload the roar of children, chop cauliflower because I want to see the ones I love as loving me forever. I see colorful daisies as the children of lawns swaying unfruitfully in the wind. I want the ones who pretend they are without wings to protect me touch sun, feel hearts— in that instant I understand almost everything Pretending I am flying over the worry and loss of this city into the warm sun, to touch who l can. I worry, making canapés over the sink, that nothing will be easy, ever if all of this is happening for reasons, that that family is my family, crying out in pain, thin daisies bent flat in a summer wind. I understand that almost, when they cry why nothing is easy in this world with its reasons. I pretend I am without wings to protect me— I dream one day of a city that’s at peace. I see something good that is in everyone. In a 100 years I wonder will the world just flip.

Blood to babe to father’s laden table. Dance, said the father, show us your grace. Whose tattered cotton whose weary gristle, heads duly shriven, wrenched in complaint? Cleft so a heart works without wanting, summoned to pleasure, free to pick dates. Curve into cursive, praxis to ashes. What reveler considers the number of plates?

Simonides, whose bitterness yoked art to memory stayed unimpressed with host and god alike. Suppose the dropped crust had occurred at your table, the tremor floored your rowdy hall of praise. Loss provokes economy: sound to scale, word to fee. Ghosts learn death from threnody.

Under the roof is the empty room papered in requiem blue. Partiers crowd the burned kitchen, gold fixtures hook to cheap lath. What is it they can tell you about absence how it abates, takes names Becomes a wall with windows faced on a formal garden, content To accept the thin rain. The syllable forgives the words that need it, a sentence Badly written, epigraphs scrawled thoughtlessly in books. Book where the hero confronts a dark riddle, book where the suitors stand at the gate and are stumped. What force brought them forward stooping at the lintel, up the chipped steps To the blue door in the unbuilt tower, half-built, the new stone.

So I say to my friend at the day job “We are bored sometimes, and scented like realtors but if everyone’s equally disconsolate under labor’s gooey caul then nuance can be stitched more vividly to secrets lodged inside of everyone until it becomes your own country with highways that carry you silently past the jetty which, from their heavy drinking, the case managers come out to failing to be stable and badly attempting to sing” We’re pushing our barques past the mansions as I say this, near the dwellings of persons whose lives have no mooring outside the slow fact of our passing— huddled arrogantly under their air-conditioning they want us to be users moved by advertisers enticing the constituency to join them and sit there and weep But we’re too busy pulling toward centers where workers assemble. While time for them is a melody played at long intervals across condominiums we who are the power know our systems so much better now come to this hour outside it now give it new form on guitar

The bug’s psalm: don’t get crushed. Afterlives feel meaningless but spring will come, push out the nubs the kids braid into pallets. Take up your pallet from lawns noon’s hardly touched. The small think gods just loll on clouds. Bugs think gods just crush.

This poem is essentially about life and death. What is clear about this particular poem, compared to most poetry, is that through the voice of the speaker the reader can feel the emotions and thoughts of the author flattening down into points that come across as very personal to delight and sadden the younger readers of today. In almost all other poetry there is a “speaker” who goes upward and upward, a machine that absorbs vibration from bigger machines but if it happens here now, in this poem will there be anyone nearby who wants to see? Maybe the dead know how to live more fully, torches turned down but still fuming like rinds around hot marshmallows do, their divided subject matter focused primarily on dark imagery with symbols of light inside— I never understood the big whoop about Demeter: reading is already a giant supplanting. A new reader discovers this work while he is leaving flowers where his dead bride used to be. But it enables him to be reborn again each time— Persephone is not the unhappy one moving up the dark stairs she considers in her consciousness as light while the poem commences and commences like the days dividing summer from its students, sponges that sway in an undersea film Until the poem spreads, and reaches its conclusion that students are each taught to believe in things differently: that Persephone was a goddess who was abducted by Pluto, the author himself a blue web that exists years and years after his death stuck inside the tired envelope of poetry Who feels he finally is reading himself, the spring flowers intense and papery like they used to be, enabling the reader again to feel the darkness with a rhythm that enables the reader to almost see. Was his conclusion merely a mistake, or did he intentionally use elements of different poems until he finally made his destination, from blue to smoking to flatten, September confused with its light?