KERRY SHAWN KEYS

Inclusions

Poems

windward the Rhipaean Mountains

for Džoja

All Saints’ Evening

1

descending Basanavičiaus

saw a dozen jackdaws

against the moon

no dictionary depicts their graphic hearts

the candles in Rasų cemetery

flutter against the dark

as these wings against the light

the dead and the living

roam the same city together

the sun is a room at twilight

with the curtains drawn

2

Rasų cemetery

Basanavičiaus’ grave

one less candle

still with me

3

acid rain destroys the lettering

recompense is to decipher

the footprints in the mud

at the unknown plots

mourners resemble gravestones

sitting on their blankets

spread like leaves on the grass

An Objective Log

for Sigitas Parulskis

Zapata, the Minister—dead,

attacked by students with quills and books—the herd hates

the tired wisdom of philosopher-poets.

Liudvikas—dead, they called him Bull

because his path left roses and blood in his tracks.

Laurynas Katkus—dead, he lived for the right word, wore

white-framed glasses and once drank tea with too much mold.

Blind Bložė—dead, Radha couldn’t get enough, he hanged himself

by his rosary.

Nijolė—dead, committed suttee on her lover’s pyre.

Eugenijus—dead, trampled by a nightmare.

Neringa—dead, belly-up in the tide after leaping the cliff at Leucas

with swallows attached to her limbs.

Sigitas Geda—dead, he liked angels and flowers, before they cremated him,

an owl landed on a branch to hoot.

Sigitas Parulskis, himself—dead, when he discovered the door,

it was locked.

My Mexican hermano—dead, an anonymous woman took him

for her anonymous husband.

And Hermes also—dead, swallowing burdock

he mistook for a rosehip.

Of course, there are the living whom I’ve never known,

never seen, seeds of my imagination,

and there are crosses and there is rain—dead,

poems, confessions, agape—dead,

and forgiveness for the Soul—dead,

everything touched—dead, even nothing

refuses to remain.

Inclusion

for Džoja Barysaitė

1997-99

Circle yesterday all grey. Sportcoat frayed

from Managua to Prague to Neringa. Senses senile.

The blue mountains submerged in the darkroom.

My photographer’s asleep on our sofa.  I am reading

a conflated copy of Childe Harold and Don Juan.

Today’s heteronym is Tristan, who lies dead-awake

on a sidestreet with the morning star in his gut.

She can tint the lack of joy I put into her hope

on the postcards stashed into a briefcase

with the negatives of a hunger for a bliss

that would outshadow the embryonic demons I harbor.

Now it’s simpler to just say the calendulas are a different

color in a different country, and the still-water

in Nida almost fresh when I imagined it salty,

coating the skin of the pillows with brine. 87% of

the inclusions in amber are spiders. They are all over

the curtains and the ceiling and the walls, and we

kill them with our sandals.  She is so good—a dolphin,

an acrobat on a railing of love, a Charlie Chaplin

wihout a flower in the silent drag of our discourse.

The candles are lit. An odalisque comes to life—I shiver.

The entire pink Baltic at sunset her bathtub and home.

My home nowhere though I might wish it here with her.

It was written by an ecclesiastical instrument

that another would return to create another version...

She or I turning she and I turning she or I...

And we would hold up our photos out of focus

into the distant offing of black and white, or in colors

too noonday intense for any deep shades of meaning to take.

We’ll trim one photo, put it in the wallet with a whole array

of fractured ghosts, and tomorrow it will be your turn

to suffer her hope, to limp down past the long-legged

women for whom you casually hunger, to roll over

in your mind and tan the other cheek, and watch the Mothers

wheel the baby-carriages to the water’s edge on the beach.

It’s the wrong bait, of course. And to feel sad, of course,

that I can’t burn better than this. A rebate at best, delivered

to the earth neither post-man nor ur-man, nor human.

“Put him back”—the first words to pierce the envelope of the ear.

And to know now that each and every half-life of each

and every second, that she recognizes my blood burns

no better than ashes beyond even the negative of being,

that I perform life as a mime handed down as hoc est corpus.

This is my body on deposit, empty, unredeemable.

This is my blood shed for myself, and no one else. Amen.

Published by arrangement with the author

© Kerry Shawn Keys, 2002

© Vario Burnos, 2002