Tim Keane My poetry has appeared widely
(Modern Painters, Big Bridge, Denver Quarterly, et al). Cinnamon Press brought
out my collection Alphabets of Elsewhere last year. These two are from one I am
finishing called Something Classical in Three Chords. Fantasia for Clarinet across a continent, transmitting a dictionary, a couple construct a conservatory to wall out ‘stability’; pen symphonies for mean speculations training their conflated senses to compose something classical in three chords: so he eats hyacinths she steals from a jerk-off minister’s garden and he blows that devil’s herald and paints the paving stones as if they are emblems of Jezebel & she whistles under the leaves of Perse until his green changers slip by roots and reappear as plumes; the best messages arrive not as pigeons but as peacocks–– cryptically betrothed, they crave knowing not solely the sea or the sun but the elegant chase of obscure hedon—word-expeditions that encode a hit-single epithalamion: out-field the cherries, box-trap the salmon, once they hunted themselves, now they brace to be musical prey–– key lime & reed & caramel & wood-wind. each measure transmutes hunger into a material satiation showering des champs softening safflower so a mouth might safely taste the suite & guide the tune, like tuna, straight into the swim A Future Grotto for a Kneeling God after Salvador Dali Living is an insane fate. Active salvation starts with deciding there’ll be no end to what hands can forge for the desiring eyes of others. Love is where generosity bleeds into selfish pleasure. Painting makes passion a cold art for the ardent. The yellow yoke (‘metaphor’) is secured in the enormous egg, hanging on a seashell, suspended mid-sky over the sterile bay. Sterile till the keyhole-altarpiece shatters a hundred shards into a briny firmament. The vaginal conch levitates with a floral clarity; its ordering actualizes the impossible liturgy of immaculate sex; at the say-so of the Virgin, colours agitate the sky with arbutus and greens, overlaying the gray ordinance of puritans with watery sun and this surfeit of blues. Under the aegis of a planetary lemon and a bangle of thin crosses, living’s baptized re-creation: a marble kneeler directs the cascade downward; falling where sight is sound, sound, sight, to frieze a mad grace, to make an oracle of secular music and a future grotto for a kneeling God. Brigit-Song for Sinéad O’Connor From a barren rotunda he’s the emperor of a kingdom named Contre-Femme: Il Duce bans bare knees from St Peter’s for he’s never been a match for a pagan roundel composed after a woman’s freckled arms: his liturgy has it in for the pink & he blanches at the nipple & slip. She defies his genuflect & comes, singing-so: her trad-glamour’s always fresh—its shocks of pearl roil damp air with an anarchy of extasie & every thing turns into some thing else—Dublin’s blues go saffron in the eyes of a downtown mage & all flags are incinerated orange into the reds of her withering flames: chords re-whiten London skies & a Rasta-ballad lays the measures proving jigs to be electric & the lullaby, a dirge & every anthem, a whisper dispelling the molester’s con & the crippling myth of the Garden Fall— play on, envoy, Francis Villon is listening, sing from the isle of the smithy, shake the fig leaves remind the lips the fruit is real. |