Trumpeter Pen, Mean Black Eye
—for Kevin Cantwell
You find a Paper Mate with a chewed
cap on a scarred classroom desk
and think of how in “Epistle”
Kevin Cantwell tells the story
of taking a drive through Peach County
with Larry Levis and discussing
the mystical properties of the ink pen—
how it knows the right from the left hand;
how the poem is in the pen &
the pen is the tongue of the hand…
Which gets you thinking
about these latest remediations,
how nobody would say that the poem
is in the touchscreen and the cursor
is the tongue of the hand. How if the pen
swan swimming in dirty river water
turns its obsidian mask toward you
and your dog on your walk tonight, it is
neither curse nor blessing. If the pen
is a trumpeter, the clogged-spit-
valve honk means something akin to,
“Don’t fuck with me.”
If you see yourself as you are
in an avian creature’s dark eye—
bent pale neck, slouching walk,
leashed terrier doing the work
of scent and sense beyond your scant
abilities, you with your crooked nose
and ever-ringing ears—
and see a swan’s mask in black ink
on vellum, you might call it poetry,
realizing the terrible affront and tacit
threat your presence constitutes
for every seen and unseen creature
in this poisoned watershed.
Then you might be tempted
as the thicket mutes before you
and the rookery of starlings lifts off
to call the eye the leashed dog
of the mind, the pen the throat
of the village reprobate, your words
the troubled footfalls of the cursor.
My Father’s Namesakes
I ask my father why
he named his cat Boccaccio.
An owl perches on a five-story
gantry crane, and the island
belches holographic fire.
He speaks of interference
and diffraction. My father
speaks of the river’s black,
the black river like a bowling
ball with scratches of halogen,
moon, and starlight, and not
a river, he argues,
but a dredged-out creek
that pours into a river.
A willow’s hair floats
atop the current. My father
says my bitterness is a hologram
without a reference beam.
I tell him it’s a wonder
anyone Downriver speaks
given how much is only
partly answered, how little
is confessed, and how few
have the agency to hear
confessions. Boccaccio
scratches out a canto
on an impervious pane
of glass. My father reads
the interference pattern and
paws his snowy head.
I keep asking my father
if his cat Boccaccio is dead.
Even living cats have stone ears
that turn inward when they hunt.
The willow’s hair floats
atop the current, opaque,
brown water, I keep asking
my father if his cat Boccaccio
will paw at the water as it flows.
Refractions trouble deep
blanks in the riverbed.
I ask my father
why he named me for his father.
Boccaccio made the canto
out of dust and wind,
but it’s only an approximation
of our breaths. No one knows
what to measure or how;
a cat is its own prosodic lesson.
I ask my father
why he named me for his father.
It was an obvious name
for the scruffy little beast.
I ask my father why
he named me for his father.
Human it is to have compassion
on the unhappy, he finally says.