They say old hearts do not
like old dreams to go unachieved
and uncalled for. They say,
when the winds blow with a finesse
unheard of, and the trees shiver as if they knew
what was about to befall them,
and the black cats all creep into shadows
even darker than they are—
the toads will be asleep under rocks
no one will ever know the names of,
dreaming old dreams of gold
and silver men, with gold and silver hearts
who can neither dream nor sleep—
nor do they want to.

© Jim Kleinhenz

It’s like tea strained through silk,
so pure, so like a tabula rasa
constrained for us to use amid our doubts.
Stay, carrion, stay and sit beside me.
For we must carve the lines of
a language into ivory conventions;
we must starve out the demons when
they cry out their so-called interventions…
Why are they here when we are not?
Too easy the simile; too easy the regret;
too easy that we are not majestic,
that our life ends in rot.

His face an ivory façade,
the Buddha smiles, unlike our God.

© Jim Kleinhenz

(For Thomas Davis)

A reptile carved, a breath of language, one
That one imagines to be real, like
A lizard given life, pretend for fun,
Perhaps, a supervening thought, so like
A kite, but not airborne at all: We hold
Its substance in our hands and come to think
That this is all there is. We even hold
It in our thoughts, still nameless, and we think
That its vital beauty make it a part
Of God. Soft, small, patina-rich, handmade
From stone or bone, rhinoceros horn: its art
Is in its existence, perfection paid
For by its half-life in our hearts and hands.
So reptilian, what poetry demands.

© Jim Kleinhenz

The way the world sways. Every leaf left
in place, its stance chiseled to each blade,
an iteration of time; each tassel of seeds,
thy bread, thy handmaiden;
as breath on the brink of disappearance,
becomes a wave become water; proportions so
large so as to stagger the seasons—
one winter questioning another.

We listen. We listen as if musical crabs are tracing a
giant sine wave across the dark mud flats.
We watch it as if a rotted rowboat, its oars like two hands
at prayer, is signaling a gesture
of permanence towards the sky. The grass
has turned from gray to blue to green.
The tide washes in. A bell is rung.
It’s as if the merry-go-round has turned it’s calliope on.
What Lao-tse has said is true.
The earth is a bellows. Use it.
The grasslands bellow and glow.

©Jim Kleinhenz

Becalmed brides, sisters, speech
so faint the spider, who
can only know land as a wave
of webs, could hear their voices
only as the distant, fallopian sounds
he always heard at human birth.
The tension in his eyes
was like a wake of cold water,
as if the sea had parted
and gravity had brought his web
to rest against a bucket on
the frozen floor, too cold for life.

How I do love you,
Little Betty Bo Peep.
How I do care about
your lovely, lonely sheep.
And you too Miss Muffett,
that such a king should play bo-peep,
and go to fools
while grapes hang frozen on
your vines. I might
have explained the clouds to you.
I might have found the great breath.
Do you see this?
Look on her: look, her lips.
St. Lucy’s gown forever fits.


© Jim Kleinhenz

If Polyhymnia could be
a winter afternoon’s great beauty,
or night, as it fills the moon’s girth
with still translucence restored from earth…

If Polyhymnia could be like the sleigh
we got for last year’s Christmas day,
not so  hot for winter’s snow,  but good once spring’s
trapeze and high wire act started up…

If Polyhymnia could be a spider moved
up from creation’s mold to sewing skirts
for dandelions… Polyhymnia, who likes shedding gowns
for scales, who never sings, who never clowns,

who never tempts the winter’s night with a serenade—
Polyhymnia, disinterested, disinterred, delayed.

© Jim Kleinhenz

The brides have passed all of the sentence tests
that Polyhymnia wanted. She asked
them to teach us how the earth became
a sullen crib. She thought the brides should sing
of nightmares and miracles, not freedoms.
If we have come to know our strengths, she said,
then perhaps we have come to love our failures
too much. Write it. This is a test.

If Polyhymnia, then nothing is transitory,
just the vast ebbing out of what always flows away.

As Polyhymnia is, there is no sentence here,
just the quiet susurration in her lips.      

Of Polyhymnia, her stone lips breathe silence,
for espousal has always been a poem to awake to.

For ancient, aimless, almost airless Polyhymnia,
the courtier of our language,

the world is made up for us. Always.

© Jim Kleinhenz

The drought is over. You can see
the wet leaves on the wet sidewalk.
They look like the petals we wore for clothes
when we were kids. That morning we
held hands, while the morning flowers impeached
a more unnecessary presence from the earth
than us. The egg, the leaf that curled
like your young tongue, the tomato
un-sighed for and far, far too red,
left far too long and on the far-too-long-and-withered vine—
left so unsuppressed.

Yes, all the grass is wet and green again.
The land is lucid, ripe.
I was nine, you were ten.

© Jim Kleinhenz

Our wise men want to call him Icarus. But he can’t be
that Icarus. There are no melted wax wings, no vaunting
ambition, just the salt crust on his face and limbs.

Perhaps he did fall from the sky and no
one heard his splash. Perhaps as the waves moved
around him, like a bright red buoy tied to the sea,

his swimming bequeathed to the water
the necessary movement for the waves. Perhaps left to swim
ashore, it’s our words that have drowned, not his soul.

Or could it be the waves have calmed?
Could it be that the sea is silent? That there
is nothing left to come ashore?

What if he’s like a cloud of paramecium
or something, and the swimming child emerges
alive from the river estuary and not dead from the sea?

My child, my child! The swimming words,
so much in abundance, about to reach
the river’s mud, amid the river’s eels…

© Jim Kleinhenz

The boy floats face down back to shore.
His body’s bleeding still. His arms move,
but only with the waves.

For a moment the world has stopped
and all things seem to multiply. Each stone
becomes a moment not to be thrown away.

Maybe all things speak their own death.
Maybe everything floats below the skin.
Maybe there are some days when you’re inside

the wing and some days when you’re not…
His cousin Alfred laughs
and Uncle Charles is smiling too. Maybe

every common thing has this in common.
For he could see that Uncle Charles would die
with his arms tied to a hospital bed,

and Alfred would be in a car accident
two years later.    He remembers 8 x 7 is 56.

The water drips. The lake swells. The boy stands.
The gods all think our words are tedious
extensions of our minds…

Or so he tells his mother who
is near death knee deep in the red water
calling him back to her.

© James Kleinhenz

Imagine that the summer’s stringencies
Have found themselves alone
In a garden, so full of bone
Petunias and bone pansies
That the Omphalos stone, full
Of captive water, full
Of bio-mass, with its
Subterranean flow—exhibits ,
In lieu of flowers—cannot pretend
To be our final fortune’s final end.
Suppose instead the garden is an egg,
Its shell, the sky about to beg
Release from all this heat,  a tuft of X,
My friend, a silence, salient, stolen, so complex.

The night he died he sat on the bed amid
my drum museum and thought about that time
at Christmas, how we hiked up Vincent’s Peak
to Leo Hightower’s log cabin with a box
of cornflakes and pancake batter all ready-made,
but with no knives or forks to eat them with.

He thought about that patch of pumpkins we
found frozen in the snow up there, a whole field full
of hued orange snow, once bright, now half eaten
by skunks and ‘coons. Eau’ de parfum de melon.
Memory, Gramps, your new pied-á-terre. He smiled and
took out his teeth. He tapped my tin drum one
last time—my mother heard—to signal earth,
her mist, his wish, their presence, ours.
He died amid what pumpkins’ say when cut
apart, for it was Halloween that night, and all the timpani…
well, the timpani try to talk come Halloween,
you know , just as the pumpkins try to die.

August ends, at last. You can see a tree
under a canopy of apple trees.
You can see a frog in a ditch.
…and just enough
water trickles off the porch roof, enough
to keep the soil and skin intact and moist,
enough to keep the earthworms quiet.

I’m standing by the oak tree that
my father planted—what?—some forty years
ago. I’m not thinking of him so much right now
and I’m not thinking of the tree either.
I’m watching the new sprinklers spray
the grass. I’m not sure why; I just like it.
You can stand there right in front of
the tree and not get wet. The spray has left
a watermark, though, a ring underneath the bark,
as though the rain could reach up through the grass
and leave a secret sign…

The snails of summer crawl across the lawn
so slowly. So even while you are
on a train to Chicago—
it is September now—
I  can still reach up to pull you down
to earth. You stay right here.
You can never leave earth in August,
not with her skin and soil so engorged.

Walter, I just want to sit on my ass and fart and think about Dante.
—Samuel Beckett

All this fractures the Wolf. The ancient leaves
amid the ancient woods, wind riffling wind
in eddies she can see but she can’t hear,
the braying of a fatted calf which she
could eat, if she could hear thy call, O Wolf.

The tympani pretend to be a thunder roll,
the crashing cymbals mean to simulate
the distant lightning, all the strings—cello,
base, violin and viola—play the
pizzicato of rain commencing…

The Wolf sits to watch—what?—the floodlights fill
the stadium? the baton poised? the crowd
about to have their daily dose of not
quite silence served up yet again? She hates
that they have come to watch a prophecy.

It’s raining full blast now, the Wolf’s exchange
for music, how things balance out, how rain
fornicates in the forest, with its pools
and puddles, how it tenders lakes and rivers
and shadows… It can’t be! Ahead she sees him.

She sees Dante, the poet of the prophecy,
the one she has to drown.  It’s why she’s deaf.
She will not hear him wail. Kill him so he will rot
in hell before the other poet comes. Kill him
and spare the world another poem about

another world. The rain and music grow
so dense around her soul. She is so quick,
too quick for him to flee. She drags him still
alive, drags him to the lake of his heart.
Sink and die. In Paradise only bubbles rise.

The tympani pretend to be a thunder roll,
the crashing cymbals mean to simulate
the distant lightning, all the strings—cello,
base, violin, viola—play it soft,
so soft, as if the rain is about to start…

The Wolf and I walk the slopes of hell.
When Farinata and Cavalcante
rise up to ask her, ‘Who were thy ancestors?’
and ‘Where Is Guido?’ she howls. O Wolf.
O Tuscan. She howls.

Curiously, I thought of Frank O’Hara
the day after the day I did not get
run over by a truck on Franklin Avenue.
I guess it’s just that story—how he did
get run over and did die. Out on Fire Island.
How he wrote, You just go on your nerve…
You don’t turn around and shout,
‘Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep.’
Or maybe it’s because Frank and my father were
the same age, and today is the day my father died
five years ago. Imagine if you could go through life
celebrating the day you were born and the day
you were going to die, that you knew.
I’m sixty-three today.
Happy Birthday!
And I’m going to live X more years.
Happy Deathday!
(No, I’m not going to
fill in the blank on that X.
We don’t tempt those gods.)
Poor Carol. I’m going to her funeral today.
I can’t even say I let her down. She was my neighbor.
I can say this, though.
If someone’s chasing you down the block,
you just run, Carol. Just run.
That would be Frank’s advice anyway
if he was still alive.

A person must suffer to breathe the air—
which she did not.

I still remember wrinkled, rosy skin—
a life at its most sacred.

I was ten when she was born as if in clouds of words,
too high to touch  the earth,
trans-planet tied to

this planet, not her earth, my mother.

The words were ours; my un-named sister died,
as if in a half-spoon, as if I could
have too many sisters.

We found the words
EL SAVIOR bleached into the bottom of
the basin where they’d baptized her; where she
had ‘cleansed her tears’;
where the baby’s blood had run.

She had slept on a pillow of words…

I still think of her wrinkled, rosy skin.

—Sister Rose Theresa, in the year of our Lord, 2010

where the cicada crawl the grass and where

the remnant sounds they scratch  
are something to be kept preserved
and un-shouted, and yet

must last the summer’s eerie evening air—

this rigorous and grandiose  
stupidity
that has educated the spirit,

which is Nietzsche’s idea, if not his words…
  
for far too much of the world’s illusions
are now confused by ancient hay,
by corn stalks blown too dry to form a seed.
  
The mystery must be what lightning bugs

must do each day when hidden in
the earth, so they can make
the grass come back to life. Just as

their photoluminescence

can be another site for the release
of heat, as when the lightning lights
the summer sky

and brings no rain, nor a god power, one

who can hurl electrons
from cloud to ground far
too fast for us to dodge

much less to see. Even his breath has ceased.

It seems as Mr. Sun kneels down to pray
each night the earth below responds—a ray
of light, across a pool of shade, tired earth
at rest in night’s still arc. Thus the earth’s worth,
all its gracious growing, is a topic
for admiration, a philanthropic
metaphor, a formal language, found fierce,
found daunting—like armor no light can pierce.
Still, Mr. Sun looks down. Is gravity
his slave? All night his informality
will keep less certain syllogisms fun.
Cogito, ergo sum. It thinks. The sun,
so startling to man—its violets,
its rose—will be enough. Thus, it forgets.

those crisp empty boxes have
been left there for the imagination to
fill up with mind stuff

for that kid in the park,
alone with a soccer ball, a good one,
one his grandma bought for him

for the World Cup
he gets past Maradona, yes, Diego
Maradona. Horton is ahead of him,

Tim Horton, in goal
charging hard, forcing his shot wide
for the goal of a minimalist poem

could be donuts, for Grammy
to take the whole team out for donuts
filled with mind stuff

It’s evening. Isaac walks to the beach as if he’s lost.
He climbs through artificial dunes, through false ramparts
pushed hard against the ocean’s erosion—cliffs of sand.
So let’s call him Clement Cliff and let’s say that he’s
an actor and distant cousin of Montgomery Cliff—
that he’s a stage of sand, a progression of the beach.
Blind, he walks to the beach each evening now
because I make him walk. He hates the water’s soul.
He feels its fear. He goes because I make him go.
He does this now (we do this now), so I can walk;
walking, it seems, is very bio-mechanical.
So-bio, so-mechanical: the brain’s music.  

We call this beach Pangaea, for it looks to be
a map of early earth; it looks a plan for earth cut by
the tides before the continents were torn  
asunder. (My, how Biblical, my dear, ‘asunder’.)
It looks that way when I stand on the cliffs—
like lands formed in jest. I love the air up here.
I love it that these cliffs are not a place
for sacrifice or suicide. Jump and you will
take a tumble. Jack fell down and broke his crown
and Jill will land on the soft sand of Pangaea.
Pretending flight, they fall.  Don’t cry, honey. It’s just
a bruise. Give it a kiss. Isaac, he laughs.

It was right that he should die before me.
Every night we stand right here among the cliffs.
(Prominent among the bluffs.)
We watch and listen as the ocean sings.
The ocean is alive. Pangaea is where sun and sea
must meet. Pangaea, the sea, the soliloquy.  
We go down to the sea in ships.
A thousand must set sail every day.
(All launched by your face, my dear.)
Tonight we sit and listen.
The ocean makes its music.
I leave on a singing ship.