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
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
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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
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
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.
