DAVID KOEHN
DELTA 16: EWA CHRUSCIEL DESCRIBES THE ROLE OF THE ARCHANGEL MICHAEL
Think of this as the tip of a pen starting a blind contour,
Digging into the available dimple in the paper,
Wrestling with the weight of the hand to push or pull
The line across the page. Everything is indeterminate.
52 minutes and 39 seconds into the movie War on Everyone:
Shot of a hot dog shop, foreground left, ta da,
The dachshund shaped sign. The address is 1216.
Yellow letters. Blue sign. White triptych of menu. Brown dog.
The Dog House
At first seems egregious. Nope. We are in the dog house.
The lot of us. Sleeping on the couch in Rusty’s AirBnB in Brooklyn,
Baby snakes coming out of my nose, I dream of Anna’s pictures
Of herself dreaming. Ellie’s sweater chest. The rust-brown date palm
In the corner of the room starts to become dirt. Tomorrow’s imagination
Of the carrot and watermelon-green water gun squirting
Blue ink at the pastel slices of cantaloupe in the yellow bowl
On top of the in-window air conditioner painted red
Like the rest of the wall, fire escape, door and fence.
Think of this as the 3rd guitar in the room when a group
Of decent musicians reinvent “Dancin’ in the Dark”
If co-written by Lou Reed and David Byrne.
Wish I had said yes. I dreamt about Rebecca
Lying on a floor of a room at Hendrix College, talking.
People are not one person. “What chair?”
What was it Tiffany said? We were so high I could not speak.
“I hide my happiness everywhere, in this skull,
In this tapestry, in this jewelry box, in Kelly, in Jack,
In the smell of pizza, in the taste of Angie’s lips,
In you, in the feel of the hairbrush run over the bottom of my feet.”
Blue Ice suggests sunset has arrived,
A pumpkin color tinged with crimson
Flare that sets off a chain of thought, string of ideas
You are now either in the foreground of your mind
Between your eyes and your fenced off yard in the Jersey Pine Barrens
Or beyond the edge of the property line in the shadow of the considered.
The image Ewa described of Michael the archangel, his spear
In the chest of the dragon, elbow bent, unable
To drive the point deeper, unable to withdraw the stuck
Blade. There is no way. But perhaps
In the far reaches of the changing day, we hold
Off the world’s impulse to destroy itself, which is our own desire
To destroy ourselves, which is my desire to destroy myself,
Which is my desire to be destroyed by you. The nest
In the grass hidden from all passersby. I wish I knew
Your mind, that you knew mine, and there was no discontinuity.
I am often my own stunt double, I ride side saddle
Through the day’s uber-everything,
While some other version of me, the one you imagine
Has left the building, drives a broken down Honda Accord
On every road listed on the AAA atlas of the roads of New Jersey.
My latest project is an anti-campaign campaign: a series of anti-project slogans.
Stop thinking of this the way a craving for a slice of Senape’s
Meets the craving met. Always in your first apartment,
Filled with the lost and found of must haves and hand me downs,
You never leave the shape of comfort first lived in.
Fall in New York, and Bay, my son, declares it a good day, asks
“Why is Fall called Fall? Spring Spring? They call it Fall because
The leaves fall?” he asks. “And Spring because the flowers
Spring forth or because the snow melts and water springs from the springs?”
He continues, “And where does the word Autumn come from?”
And, “Is the pumpkin the largest fruit?”
Last night, Joseph Rios did not read a poem with “mother fucker” in it.
Sampling. Walking through Chelsea market to the high line...
Linda and her ex-husband used to drive through Chelsea
With her twin sister to watch the hookers give blowjobs
In doorways. We are not one thing. Things are not one thing.
The “marked deck” also means one can make magic.
Of all things, our DVR mostly records the Kardashians.
I almost never win.
Which means discontinuity provides our only pattern:
This is some dangerous shit though.
At Farm to Tray I ate a fried peanut butter,
Banana, and strawberry jelly sandwich.
1 hour and 19 seconds into the War on Everyone, Jackie Hollis
Played by Tessa Thompson holds the intensely pink, Backlash
By Susan Faludi -- and wards off our dismissal.
Bay studies the stand of Purple Coneflower, now mostly seed heads,
A few still fraught with the disappointed petals seeming to regret
Their lingering. Rebecca,
The loose air filled in with asemics of Wild Oat.
David Koehn's first full-length manuscript, Twine, now available from Bauhan Publishing, won the 2013 May Sarton Poetry Prize. David just released Compendium (Omnidawn Publishing 2017), a collection of Donald Justice's take on prosody. David's second full-length collection, Scatterplot, is due out from Omnidawn Publishing in 2020.