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Three Poems by TIMOTHY O'KEEFE

Trombone Choir

All fall aspires, this

Tinted shard in the sill

Lit and lighting.

Follow the horns that follow

There, they sound toward:

One mind's many, lore

Of the gimlet hour speak

All salience and saltwater, all

Speak the chorister.



Cars go to the mountain, mountains

Wait for their lifting. Like

A wind. The very noise you see.

Now the princedom now the age.

Strewn gaze to glass go down

Gutbucket, marigold, down down...



It calls and calls.

This last ladder, intact.

Pond up from its brass burrow.




32   The Paris-American

To Robert Duncan

Trace me simple--
a figure the children can't
not color in, circle
of an unsteady hand--
if never more than this flame
under the hill, a flowering index,
this black dog chasing an atmosphere.

Crayon-lit trunks
crush to paper, millenia to sheaves we
populate—a simpering June,
a julep, some heirloom fear
we couldn't look up
the picture for, the meaning for.



33   The Paris-American

Coal on Cream

My fronts were beyond ambush, my bastions cleanly surrendered.
An afternoon of slow textures—moss patch in the turret, a moth
with spring in its fur, and none to scale the oceaning view.
Is it umblemished or healed? (A schooner then, a shoal.) They came
at night: the youngest sang madrigals, the oldest sewed buttons
on a no-name garment. For breakfast, I dressed like a soldier
and all the glassware complied, right down to the last icicle.
My fronts were quietest in summer, cleverest in suede. They
come at night, it was said. What is imaginable is foregone.
Look there, it was said—at the mead hall, at vespers, such
mild faces at the stake—that's how the spinnakers glow.



34   The Paris-American

Picture
Timothy O'Keefe is the author of The Goodbye Town, winner of the 2010 FIELD Poetry Prize. His poems and lyric essays have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Conjunctions, Denver Quarterly, Indiana Review, Seneca Review, The Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. He lives in Athens, Georgia, where he is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Piedmont College.

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