Two Seasons

I want the light 
to be like that again.

The way a spring morning lit
the alley fence in a scale of
yellow.

Ginseng sharpened my visual appetite.
Hunger sharpened my artistic
sensibilities. Words, sought,
wrought, fashioned into existential
sonnets, pantoums, rondeaus, and
verses, blank and free.

Days were taut as cables,
unstable as isotopes,
lived like fabulous fables.

Winter nights were lit
with yellow constellations that
prickled like prickly pear pads.

We were beneath the landing pattern
for the Air Force Base.

They came in low and made icicles redundant. 

This was after my peregrinations
with one more in a long line of
uncaring—I’ll just say ‘people’—
as I don’t know the appropriate words
for empty relationships.

Memories either blossom or chill.
Daffodils at park entrances, or
yellowed lawns in well-tended suburbs.

I’ve lost the summer and autumn,
they shriveled to mere days.
Days are never enough.
Play with the light.
Let hunger be your lion and your clown.

“You may do it extempore, for it is nothing but roaring.”—A Midsummer Night’s Dream

[RK, 3/5/21]

Coronavirus #5

I plan to travel through a landscape
untouched by dirty hands.

The city is four hundred and fifty-six
years old. She wears it well—although
I can’t see beneath the evenly laid
cobbles and chicanery.

I’ll bring flashlights and
philosophical concepts.
They peel off like t-shirts
and dip their academic toes
in the Atlantic Ocean.

I imagine swimming out
into the Gulf Stream
off the coast of
North America.

I hope. I care.
I’m actually lying to you.

Follow my kite, it marks
my passage through a landscape
untouched by unwashed hands.

[RK, 3/5/21]