The Skin of Meaning. Keith Flynn

recognize

      as the new violins

      are forming

      in the ageless

      swaying trunks

THE GLORY FAÇADE

      No one gets the life they deserve.

      Eternity is not the endless passage

      of time, uninterrupted.

      It is contained in a single moment,

      where time has stopped,

      a frozen moat,

      a conversation with a stone.

      Each year a column, slowly tilting.

      “God is the only architect,”

      sd. Gaudi. “I merely copy.”

      He became a studious imitator

      of the tree, the river, the wind.

      Light builds everything,

      strings of light

      torn from sheer blocks,

      streamers inviting you

      to reconnect them;

      the tails of comets,

      the rocket’s smoky trail

      mixed among vaporous clouds,

      mist off a boiling pot,

      the searching vine’s restless rivulets.

      Gaudi was killed by a streetcar,

      seditiously moored to its tracks,

      unable to pass through him,

      or follow his immense light.

      Buildings are made of music,

      rising with purpose,

      filling the air’s geometry with forms.

      Cities should be built

      from the worship

      of nothing in particular,

      and filled with the feelings

      of its people, the only mortar

      that can reinforce the beams.

      From this I make my life a bell

      and hurl its chime

      across the expanse,

      and a gong of years develops,

      buttressed by nothing.

      The spool of that life

      is filled with temporary commotions,

      knowing that a human being

      in love with mystery

      is never finished

THE EXILE

      This is my last letter. The first one

      disappointed in a love triangle has

      lost the game. Some things upon

      which I’ve aimed were undoubtedly

      innocent; but that is for others to decide.

      I’ve tried to rope the world in countless

      ways and have done the best I can,

      with tangled prayers and no reprieve.

      The danger in the Beast is its seasons.

      The morning star enlightened Buddha

      and his first words formed a poem

      out of the desperate ardors,

      adders made of words, blind as a boxer,

      striking out at every sound.

      How do we discriminate?

      The map is linear, but poetry is

      circular and continuous,

      untangling as it tells.

THE BOOKMOBILE

       for Kay Ryan

      Here comes that tinny bookmobile

      and the children whinny and giggle,

      their mouths in the shape of a comb,

      a gaggle who open books and find

      an ice cream cone is waiting, in icy

      repose, just resting there in the gutter,

      and when the children butterlick the

      cone down flat their tongues turn

      black and swell so big that they won’t

      fit back and poems form on them.

RETAIL

      I will make my art in the margin, I said,

      while everyone scurries to look busy,

      hoping to impress the Boss,

      whose business is failing,

      and now must lay his employees off.

      I don’t move a muscle,

      hamstrung by commission,

      and naturally gifted with gab.

      I’m used to leaving a big impression

      and saying little, my position

      secure, having outlasted my peers

      who swam back to the university

      to spawn their books, whose years

      are filled with glib rejoinders

      to colleagues about tenure and

      pension plans, summers at Yaddo

      and Vermont, the right density of manure

      for their organic gardens. Fearless,

      I will build a church of good-byes,

      poems that work their retail magic

      even on holidays, that wink when

      they should wallow, and kneel for no man.

PUTTING

       for John Groover

      It’s easy to get the yips.

      Any small ration of anxiety

      will set the hands a-flutter.

      Forget the hypnosis and

      meditation techniques,

      focus instead on the hole,

      that Freudian objective,

      staring with its bad eye,

      out of a perfectly manicured

      jigsaw puzzle of jumbled

      green elements, designed

      to humble every human

      who stares intently into it.

      In this drama, light reverses

      itself and doubt is born.

      The first sob does not grate,

      but makes all intoxication rise,

      doom-eager, as the eagles

      of