Richard Kenney

Sky a shook poncho.
Roof   wrung. Mind a luna moth
Caught in a banjo.
...

Touch swollen tonsils:
gill slits.
Inside eyelid: slimelight.
Cheek: shark.
...

in Riddles, for Mary
*

How many suns
will cross its coign
...

1


As so-called quarks, so atoms before and through
And after molecules, which too
Constitute us awhile, pluming
...

Loose leaves in a metal ball
Or men in a shark cage steeping,
Ideas stain the limpid mind
Even while it's sleeping:
...

I. Paul's Prandial

Imagine barbed wire, served alive and writhing,
spooled upon a fork: Paul Ryan's lunch.
The sauce is red. It's on his shirt. I think,
he thinks, this may not easily expunge.
...

Snap tempered tooth chips

sawyer shouts steel in sawlog

lock engine off slack
...

Touch swollen tonsils:
gill slits.
Inside eyelid: slimelight.
Cheek: shark.
Here foreknown
I've dived
down dawnless
microbial snows,
phosphor blue to blue-
black, to black.
I fend
fish. I find
the saffron curb
of   the sulfur vent,
veering voiceless
again into the segmented,
swaying, white,
toothed tube-
worm, Time.
...

Sky a shook poncho.
Roof   wrung. Mind a luna moth
Caught in a banjo.

This weather's witty
Peek-a-boo. A study in
Insincerity.

Blues! Blooms! The yodel
Of   the chimney in night wind.
That flat daffodil.

With absurd hauteur
New tulips dab their shadows
In water-mutter.

Boys are such oxen.
Girls! — sepal-shudder, shadow-
Waver. Equinox.

Plums on the Quad did
Blossom all at once, taking
Down the power grid.
...

in Riddles, for Mary
*

How many suns
will cross its coign
before the last
freeze? What
pennywhistle
spun its point
on the glass
breeze? Whose
airs are loosened
in the pane
like miniature
degrees, where
breath condenses
into rain
among the apple
trees? Here
tesserae
have turned to earth,
here blossoms may
attend to birth
as sun becoming
leaves; here
branches seem
to lead the glass,
whose scenes compose
as seasons pass,
the lifetime, piece
by piece.... A sphere

*

Begins and ends:
suppose, as glaciers
drop their catch,
as memory's
a ragged seine,
as grain by grain
a dead morraine
the sky is softly
sifting ash,
as constellations
each rescind
to embers, umbral
lees—alas,
the crown lens
will surely tear
to end the long,
sweet refrain
of sun to moon
to sun again,
of E from M
C2—
and then what breath
once shaped the pane
may lose itself
(we pray) in airs
our children, too,
had breathed in time,
and theirs, and theirs.

*

If oracles
recall in riddles
orreries
in orreries,
the quantum of
the apple's arc
the piper's tune,
the dancer's turning
crown of sonnets
in the dark
by starlight ground
between the querns
spun withershins
of dawn and dusk
to wreathe a green
and weathered earth—
it's moonshine, love,
and loneliness.
Do looney jigs
unwind the suns?
Might jugglers drop them
every one?
Are seeds resewn,
or tales respun?
When pipers stop
to play the bones
the very stones
are left undone.

*

To please the Sphinx
all life unreels
through black magnetic
stone-strewn fields
where pitchblende blinks
its slow decay
tic-tic-tic
de-lightedly
by alpha, beta,
gamma, delta—
time dilates
and starlight bends
in gravity
like roundelays.
All light, partic-
ulate, licks out
one way, in waves;
electric clouds
expand in spheres
whose uncracked shells
concentrically
unrecalled
across the parsecs
and the years
ring out, shift red
(like Hell), disperse
the edges of
the universe—

*

Eclectic quarks
a dish collects
to parse into
initial text—
miraculous,
exotic sky!—
a Book of Kells
whose quirkish tale
in optical
if stale effects
is mirrored in
the lemur's eye,
as through the hatchling's
candled egg
comes first light to
the cockerel—
As Sol dissolves
against the clock,
and seismographic
needles track,
and continents
incline to raft,
uranium
sines off to lead
or raindrops pock
a full carafe
to lilypads
inside the head—

*

Assymmetries:
no wave contracts—
a tracer's seam-
less, sequinned O,
or stoned window's
cataract—
What echoes in
the ears of bats,
frail globes of light
colliding back?
Kaleidoscopes
reshuffle shards,
toc, starred;
tic, intact—
let's retrodict
the apple's fall,
the reel's hiss,
the needle's spin;
the pin-gears on
the color wheel
feel artificial
after all;
let's kiss the dice
behind the eyes
and finish this
where it begins—
the empyrean's
synchesis:

*

Now ask why seasons
follow sequence,
green to red
or red to blue,
while life re-seeds
back through the snow
like pattern bleeding
into hue;
how particles
of colored sand
sift back a shaman's
circling fist,
as first riddled
suns-at-seed
spun out this creaking
artifice—
Would sonnets turned
at light speed
cooper square
in their vitrines?
Or meter's super-
sonics trace
a breath against
a mirrorscape
where starlight's slow
as clotted cream,
and every scheme
anticipates?

*

A stich in time:
where earth has cooled,
antique tectonic
shelves awash
in tepid seas
whose milky chyme
has knit such spiral
molecules
as struck off copies
of themselves
(O miracle!)—
and what's occurred
but stray elec-
trical discharge
between some cloud
and neaping tide
still arcs inside
the notochord....
Who knows when first
aortic arches
registered
an ocean's surge,
or slipped awake
or stirred asleep;
how many tides
had ebbed until
the tiny seahorse
heart could leap?

*

And here Odysseus'
dazzled seas,
his charts, his quilled
geodesy:
where suns have fallen
grain by grain—
according to
what codicil?—
like yellow pollens,
sill and pane;
where Coriolis
forces cause
the cosmic dust
to curl down drains
whose gravities
call back for us
across the years,
like sea to rain....
Where, streaming tails
of phosphorus
dead-center through
the Ferris whorls
and net-work of
the window's seine,
white moons like minnows
slip its sash
into the seiche
inside the brain—

*

A seer's odd
sensation: say
why dawn should follow
each saccade,
Charybdis' widened
irides
contract again
from west to east,
a narrow-waisted
fall of sand
or hollow winestem
once released
between two fingers
of what hand,
its syrinx sounding
centuries....
And here the Masters
of Lascaux
pinched out an earth
and shaped a sky
inside a mountain
years ago—
time out of mind,
we say—just so,
rebounding echoes
fade to rhyme
across an inch,
an age, and die—

*

Of course he's blind,
whose achromatic
lenses frame
his myths around
a perfect scale
of azimuths
and measured time—
touch the braille:
a moth wing brushed
to prism's flame,
a telescope's
collapsing torch
astronomers
routinely scry,
or pipers, jack-tars,
all the same:
to ask true numbers
of the night,
to know the cauter
of the day—
one star resolving,
silver, high,
another disk,
another, then
a cataract
of viscous light,
a stack of coins
against the eye—

*

And what attractive
force is this?
Coincidence,
et cetera—
full moons inset
and stacked like plates;
the planets nested
flat as spoons—
a satyr-play.
Ah, love, instead,
let's study love;
it's getting late.
As geomantic
curvatures
may cup the clanking
cosmos in,
a sparking censer's
pendulous
and fragrant arc—
as space depends
on fob-chains which,
if charmed and real
are wholly im-
material—
then we, I think,
are amateurs,
and life a mys-
tery to feel:

*

If jugglers are
geometers
and pennywhistles
cost a dime;
if planets on
their abacus
click back to us,
tic back, because
the open skies
in memory
are perpendic-
ular to time—
one purple night's
a gemmary
of all nights figured
by design
across our sleep
in ores as rare
as any dust-motes
in the mine
of empty space—
an orrery
whose imperfection
in the mind
of which jongleur
you've married (who?)
reflects in these
beriddled lines:

*

As ephemer-
ides of blue
and red and green
are held apart
caparisoning
simple truth
seen bending through
the prism's bars—
as light unrav-
elling reveals
such orreries,
ascending, starred,
as unify
into a field
where dream dilates
and glass extrudes
and sonnets draw
like taffy through
a compass-needle's
eye—this chart
is scanned in light
of you, of you,
the physics he's
accustomed to,
the gravity
against his heart,
whose art again
begins for you.
...

1


As so-called quarks, so atoms before and through
And after molecules, which too
Constitute us awhile, pluming

Through our slowly changing shapes
Like beachscapes
Through a duneless sandglass, say

(I said, once) — all these
So utterly forgetful, wiped clean
As numbers with each new use, lint-free.

How not so words, which pass our minds
And mouths and ears from hind-
Most elsewhere, on their way to elsewhere — why

So?
Words are the sum of their histories: rose
And roke and no and blanketing snow.


2


So much less LEGO-like, click-
Click together than like slick
Tentacular

Colonial hydrozoans tossed
Together in the copper pots
Of   predication — all cross-

Shock and shimmery tangle —
How can
Anyone calculate semantic

Sets so dervishly complex?
How can we not expect not less but hellish
Much more than to mean what we say? Then guess:

How can we better but
Hope to become in sum what
We say when we say again love?
...

Loose leaves in a metal ball
Or men in a shark cage steeping,
Ideas stain the limpid mind
Even while it's sleeping:

Ginseng or the scent of lymph
Or consequences queasing
Into wide awareness, whence,
Like an engine seizing

Society remits a shudder
Showing it has feeling,
And the divers all have shaving cuts
And the future's in Darjeeling—


Blind, the brain stem bumps the bars
Of the shark cage, meanwhile, feeding,
And the tea ball's cracked, its leaves cast
To catastrophic reading:

Ideas are too dangerous.
My love adjusts an earring.
I take her in my arms again
And think of Hermann Göring,

And all liquidities in which
A stain attracts an eating,
And of my country's changing heart,
And hell, where the blood is sleeting.
...

He says beaucoup when he means a lot.
I guess that means he's polyglot.
He talks a lot. His streak is blue.
But I'm not sure it means beaucoup.
...

Risible, he who at Le Cafe Haute-Coif
gaffes: gazing absently at a graceful jeune fille
feels the unnoticed soda-straw nick his nostril,
steals a glance sideways, scanning for witnesses,
nurses his drink, and subsides once more into nuance.
...

Is not always best.

Still, he can't help reflecting how once
the grim wince
came, climbing a rope hand over hand.
And

now he is dressed.
...

When men get to feeling old
they don't know what to do.
They gaze around for some elixir
to fix their thews.

Mostly it's in women,
though oftentimes in drinks
or cars or mere mechanicals
they'll find their minx.

Women on the other hand,
organic from the start,
solve the problem differently,
with mind, not heart:

they root for herbs and balms and simples
(howe'er their doctors doubt them):
they stopper them in bottles and they
talk about them.
...

They met on the internet. They knew right away
they were made for each other, plain as prey.

They were the same comix. They liked the same movies,
especially the ones with the muscles and uzis.

Vladimir murmured as if in a trance
the President's got such delicate hands…

crooning in a postgeocoital calm
see how they nestle right into my palm…

Now it's true the Commander's got awesome paws
They're elegant, delicate, fit for a boss

who likes them kissed, and sometimes greased,
but of small things, they're not the least:

the inside's where he's truly little
like the space inside the excluded middle

of one of his whoppers, sluiced from the stump
to the internet (see hashtag Trump).

It's why Vlad loves him so, soul-small,
dissembled, assembled, his Russian doll.

P.S.

Commander in tweet is addicted to anger.
He's addicted us all: his triumph, our rancor.

When Michelle said go high—read this poem—did I?
Can satire suck sanguine hope from a canker?
...

1

Sick of ink (a professional worder)
I went into the biosphere
With two botanizers, a birder,
And a Leave‑No‑Trace‑Trained mountaineer.

We witnessed the sacred in several classes.
They showed me how elevations flatten
On a topo map. Through fine field glasses
We confirmed a quantity of Latin.

2

Idle by nature, sick of talk,
I went into the somewhat wild
With an undifferentiated dog,
An apple, a gum wrapper, and a six year old.

The crags scratched our eyeballs. A brace of Quink
Came burtling out of their whiskets. Old Breather
Whulphed. It wasn't what you think,
Exactly. I guess you had to be there.
...

I am Pan Sapiens. I don't speak well,
And so I write. Some say I look like hell.
I think that's hard. I think I look like you.
Pan in, however—never mind the view:
You've seen it all your life, the diorama
Stinking with the crowd of us, from Rama-
Pithecus to poor Neanderthal,
Who's lost his lisp at last, and, standing tall
Peers like any fool into my eyes
Where once upon a time, a wild surmise…
Now, dip your quill into his pupils' ink:
It isn't how l look. It's if I think.
...