A KEENER, A BROTHER TO THE BANSHEE

I am an ex-gandydancer/retired steelworker/bag of wind who thinks a guitar is a kind of birdhouse (a haunt,inhabited); who thinks that if we cannot be geniuses (though we are all ‘genus’ and ‘species’)—that the best alternative is to be distinctively ourselves, to let our pedestrian/native/
indigenous genie out of the bottle (out of the bracken and the bog)—so to speak; who dubiously, ambivalently and self-deprecatingly assays that once Anonymous is known/labeled/bagged/
tagged— he is to that extent less than himself. So what is the point? And yet, how sweet to sing one’s self away.

LANTERNS

She called it the patriarch of goldfish,
saying, Chinese have proper respect
for carp. He liked its armored look,
the way it fought to the end of a line.

They talked of sex and art, of living
even if it meant their undoing.
Their own words scared them.

He told her about balloons
on a black branch amid ice floes.
Filled with sunlight, they were lanterns
of inspiration he could not attain.
Leaving, he’d almost wept.

They watched the carp sift mud,
(lone prospector in a pool
of cultivated trout),
then drifted to the cemetery:

geese squabbling to the next splash of light,
Stanislaus leaning against Goldsmith—
the graveyard a surprise party holding its breath.