Text Box: Every Atom of Your Learned and Disordered Flesh
—Kenneth Rexroth

Are voyages back in time really scent-enduring?
Do you remember the cool, pollened air
of our youth, sitting in the backyard
among the tiger lily asking only to hear how long
certain sparrows held certain songs?
From tree to tree into evening, and then,
into sleep, rising toward a world as boundless
as the heart’s mind, and still, that beautiful child
who never could have come from your body
remains  beautiful. Who really knows
what images befall the dark elms at night.

It was when we discovered
we ourselves were the language—
when we hurled words into the dark
the way children throw stones, and the lake
always called back—name, memory, incantation.
I can hear, now, your nighttime breath
soft and warm and close.
A man, blind, must touch the world
like a woman. And the world
like a woman rains.


Published in The Red Clay Review
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Every Atom of Your Learned and Disorder Flesh from Kenneth Rexroth’s “Andrée Rexroth” (The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth, Copper Canyon Press, 2002)

“when we discovered we ourselves were the language” from Valzhyna Mort’s “Belarusian I” (Factory of Tears, translated by Elizabeth Wright and Franz Wright, Copper Canyon Press, 2008)







Poem in Flux

As if incandescence
imitates
inertia, the self-hurl
at angles
into what was if
for a minute
the air. From flight,
behold as it would
the incestuous dive
into clear cold pools
of language, words
that sink into the silt
of tissue, cell, and brain,
seep into the chant
of requiem.   Be silent.
This world
will resound in aria,
the starlings
descend—black songs
in the mouth of dawn.


Published in The Red Clay Review
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Lightning Bugs

Lightning bugs rise
from twilight grass
like little fireworks.
There’s a reason
for their light.
The rhythms
attract mates
the way we too
send out subtle
signals of love.
How often
we flutter through
the cool night
only to be trapped
in the glass grasp
of an eight year-old’s
imagination.
We pace the clear walls
saying to ourselves
we must go	we must go	
we must go.


	Published in Insanity’s Horse
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Arriving Home

Touring the eastern seaboard in the same
brown Torino wagon, I was my father’s copilot. I followed
blue and red lines through colonial towns, past state parks.
It was my calculation of seventeen miles till New Paltz.
When we finally reached the green signs
of our own turnpike, my father would look at me and ask
What time will we arrive home?  I would make more
calculations, insist we would get there exactly 9:45—
funny, how he always took a higher number—9:48 I argued
would be a tie. And how I yelled as my father rolled
down our street, foot off the gas, the green digital clock
flashing 46, 47.  Often we unpacked the car in the dark,
in silence. He drives a Cadillac now and the only real places
we go are football games and family barbecues,
and how those minutes seemed much longer then, dangling
my legs over the ripped vinyl that always seemed
to scratch the back of my knees.


	Published in Exit 13
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The Traveler

Man is a being of distances.
–Jean-Paul Sartre

1
My asylum is emerald green
not white
and the walls have a convex feel.
I know because I have
run my fingers along its skin,
I have felt the pores. It lives
as I breathe.

2
Walking at night

the great live oaks
slowly pull me toward
shadows

their outstretched
gangling limbs
cover my eyes

I hear faint whispers—
do not go
your place is here
take hold.


	Published in the Rattlesnake Review
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Spring Song

Sitting over poetry
steam from my coffee
eludes the dining room
chandelier near
where the dog dozes
and the sun’s rays
lick the windowsill
The song sparrows
nesting in the vent
above the bathroom
downstairs shuffle
and chant within plaster
and darkness
their dalliances scatter
a pile of dried twigs
and still
I tiptoe the toiletseat
to peer through the fan
Their movements slow
the dog’s ears grow out
and the first dancing
daffodil winks
her golden eyelashes
like a songstress
at the Cotton Club


Green Heron Poetry Project Winner 2009
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Arriving Home

Spring Song

The Traveler

Lightning Bugs

Poem in Flux

Every Atom of Your Learned and Disordered Flesh

eMail: David / ©2008 David Crews. All rights reserved.

“Tefilah” (looking within)

painting by Carol Buchman