Thursday, October 6, 2022

Joseph Kidney : Two poems

 

 

 

 

Truth Tired with Iteration
 

Days of the nothing-that-can’t-wait variety, Spring’s
come untucked, and the birds are revving their throats

with nowhere to go. As soon as I’m awake I make my bed,

rendering a service to later exhaustion. My phone is full

of things that beat me to it, the hey and nvm of a dozen

retracted warnings. Half a conversation from another room

feeds its shadow through the wall, without colour, detail,

or structural transparency; it’s not an inside voice

until it stays inside your lungs, I think, and instantly

rescind the flicker from the fuse, in order to ride  

a sequence of error, compunction, and ethical pride.

Then I brush my teeth, a monotonous vigour

imparting the fragrance of industrial spearmint.

The kettle is rumbling. Wilted, the irises

resemble a bouquet of sneezed-in Kleenexes.

I’m not sure how compost works, but something

about soil must be contagious. A homeostatic system,

the body for one, predicates life upon a series

of exceptions, from the usual commerce of heat

with diffusion. I remember by Parliament Hill

a series of locks, a staircase of water, and boats

idling upward. He rises on the toe, that spirit of his

in aspiration lifts him from the earth.
He is a noun
is a noun is a noun is a noun.

The worn elastic of an overplayed song.

Synonyms almost, abstraction and abduction.

 

  

Quasi Fan Tutte

She goes to bed. He makes his move
in chess, preferring lately the fianchettoed

bishop. Tucked behind a triad of pawns

it is coiled like a diamondback, reptilian

tongue about to lunge at a flicker

of dislodged gloaming. They offer 

an exchange of threats which like all

threats are questions. Equerries confuse

a caved in roof for shelter. But he can

constellate the table salt, decode

the braille off a ribbed condom, even as

he sails on a sea freighted with golden fire,

a cynosure who—to the lodestar’s tug

—sings the blinding of Orion, the sky alive

with narrative and direction. The dark-square

bishop, immured by the alternative, seems all

aspersing verdict and episcopal swipe.

It fidgets with a rosary and prays to patience.

He pours a drink. She sees in a sleep
that’s bribed with dreaming: a chapel on a bridge

or a bridge that is a chapel. It connects

the pasture to a palace which leans on the connection.

Sprockets of wild asparagus abut the barn

like frozen grass; disheveled on a chimney,    

the straw corona of a stork nest. Mating

season, that mock apocalypse, never was

so economic: nothing wasted and no one happy.

And the waters burst like a zit, bulked in splash

upon swell, swimming things vomited up

flagellant morsels in diminished multiplication.

And the cantilevered link went jack-knife-like,

unmooring both stable and manor, which smashed

in the middle air where light moistens, clouds

asphyxiate. Not a nostril in the parish missed

that fragrant blend of manure and chrism.

Asperged in sweat, she woke, inhaled

a glass of water, and heard the ticking tock clock

picking at the stitches in its pocket.

 

 

 

 

Joseph Kidney has published poems in Arc, Vallum, Oberon, The Fiddlehead, The New Quarterly, PRISM, and Al-Araby Al-Jadeed (in Arabic translation). He won the Short Grain Contest from Grain, and The Young Buck Poetry Prize (now the Foster Poetry Prize) from CV2 for the best poem submitted by an author under 35. He was shortlisted for the Bedford International Poetry Award, Arcs Poem of the Year, and The Malahat Review's Far Horizons contest. Originally from New Westminster, BC, he is currently completing a PhD in early modern drama at Stanford University. His chapbook Terra Firma, Pharma Sea is available from Anstruther Press.