UNDERGROUND VOICES: POETRY
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ROBERT S. KING
The Crow’s Orbit My youth and my old age are spent in boxes. Centuries of falling in and climbing out of holes. The whole of me together and lost, one soul trying to keep one pain at a time, one loss at a time, yet many scattered hopes all at once sticking to the steady movement of decay. And what has my flesh gained but something to wash off, different color dirts, a variety of burial gowns, a multitude of faces burrowing into chests (and even some who smile at my departures). And why of all the hopes I’ve built is the tombstone the only thing named after me? I ask, no I beg, over and over inside a box and out, how can I lift and throw away this many heavy stones whose cool marbles wink in both sunlight and rain, making my name hard to read and even harder to remember? In what life will I sit on a dozen eggs without crushing one? In what year do I resculpt these shells and fly off into some answer that goes beyond the nearest stars, goes further into the black hole of truth, there to be, and not becoming. Yet I have always been a bird afraid of heights. Years of limping around in different corpses, not knowing in which grave or which heaven I belong. But none of them keeps me. I pop, re-pop out of tombs and wombs, a cuckoo clock, a senseless jack-in-the-box, coming out with the stump of one black wing on my back, coming out mad and crying, spitting and spitting dirt that a child by nature must learn to eat. Yes, I come out with my mouth still in the same shape of its last pain. I cry for brighter mirrors, but my lips round into a circle and my words bellow forth from the deepest holes I’ve known. On every tombstone is a crow, a black braggart who has flown through the dark ages, found nothing else to land on. The Gravedigger’s Workday Not every moment is death. Some seconds are firsts: the chocolate-lip child giving me advice on waking the dead, a butterfly landing on my shovel, decorating the deadliest day. Sometimes firsts are second thoughts, the child handing me a sweet, the butterfly lifting on a faint breath, lifting with it a shadow of rainbow, a streak of quickening light only a child or a soul can see. Robert S. King has been writing and publishing since the 1970s. His work has appeared in hundreds of magazines, including The Kenyon Review, Southern Poetry Review, Lullwater Review, Chariton Review, Main Street Rag, and others. He is currently Director of FutureCycle Poetry, www.futurecycle.org. |
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