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 ‘*****. 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 *** and **** 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. **** him so he will rot
in hell before the other poet comes. **** 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 *****?’ she howls. O Wolf.
O Tuscan. She howls.