(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 ***** 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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