Penn Kemp

Regarding what is Given

While Klee takes a line for a walk
Cash walks the line and you type
a line already over exposed on
the blank but measured screen.

The line requests reply in-
quiring Why?  Plaintive as
a choir in plainsong.  Empty
as a needle eye and just as full. 
 
When a line stares at you too
long, what is it demanding?
Not enough said or too much
down in black against white?
 
What lies behind the line that
lies so flatly on the page?  Planes
of undifferentiated disparity in
two dimensions?  Perception

shrunk to the length and
width of a white sheet for-
getting depth for breadth.
 
Breath forgotten,
squeezed onto even
surface.  Plain but not
 
simple.  Simple but
not easy.  Eased into
familiar complicity
the iterative wanders

through uninvestigated realms
of possibility not yet verbalized
in reams of rhyme and story told,
spewing reasons all their own.

A patter of cliché recurs at random
when the pat lie surfaces all too
conveniently, slips into place as if
pattern might solve that old puzzle
 
you need to articulate again and
again.  What springs to mind can be
sometimes appropriate, sometimes
appropriated.  Mind the gap to grasp

indifferent reminders of what might
remain reflexive difference.  A gift
of involuntary association demands
alert reaction to discern what could

be learned, what spurned and what
just is.  Carried over.  To the next
poem where Why echoes down the
row.  Give that piece your best regards. 
Let it cross the line into icon.  Or song.

Night Mare, Night Air

Night rustles outside our window, murmurs
and squeaks.  Whimpers follow outraged
raccoon yowl.  Orange and black streak

across the dark pane I can’t see through
into night creatures’ world, conjuring
interlaced smells of skunk, mouse, bat –

disturbing our neighbour hound's nose.
Scent leads a trail to territorial war, deep
enmities nurtured throughout the long wee

hours before dawn lifts that velvet cloth to
reveal grey, seeping shade back to clarity.
Daylight cicada notions begin threading a

brightening air.  Dragonflies wing-web
the pond.  Inside I still dream of prowling
tiger, of some long shadow
stalking.

The Long and Short of All

Imagine you are lying in bed, letting thoughts float
As your eyes adjust to the gloom, they perceive

difference, shades of distinction, discrete shades
along the grey scale.  Scaly amphibians straight out

of the Jurassic in one corner.  Scary Neanderthals,
hairy and club ready, in the other.  Over there,

long lines of ancestors wave and bow, ready to
speak in languages you never in this life knew.

All is translation, carried across, the metaphor of
being.  Being here, I am translated there.  Where?

Only the shadow knows.  The words speak for each
other and themselves.  They tumble in their sphere,

happily clunking into and through each other.  Hue
beyond spectrum spreads into sound and heat.  Who

could doubt the veracity of such tangibly felt reality? 
Not, in the dream, I who am fully there living sweet

rounds that seem so perfectly whole  I could spend
life here.  Nothing conjures any outside I can imagine

beyond curved boundaries of this floating world
where fear and hope merge and melt into memory.

Dream so solid, how does it dissolve into instant
frayed fragments, an image waning, voice trailing

off.  Time collapsed offers multiple spheres, entries
along the path between past, present, possible futures.

Interjections interrupt the trail we conceive as real,
the present as gift, as presence, as the only possible

way through, way in.  Memories weigh in as if
they were real.  Futures impinge as if secure.

This January when double doors open back and
forth, turn your face to the rear.  Who’s there but

shadows, looming in the corners under cobwebs?

O Lyric, O Lyre, O Liar

Words, they too can cut
through skin, the many layers
of meaning, to rest alive

in the metaphor of beating
beating heart, the rhythm of
survival.

Old lays, old lies surround
and comfort, surround and
drown the sound of a voice

I wish to hear.  I will not call
though I have designs on you.

Glamour is too easy
a word for you, though
we know from Auden:
‘Beauty is difficult,
Yeats.’

Fascination?  No, not
those tingly faery
notions.  Large
is not the word; it
clunks in the throat.

Space, does that convey
the breadth, the spread,
the clarity, the open
heart?

Where is the word that meets
your measure?

Not ecstatic,
not elated, none
that lift you out

Expanse,
Expansion,
Enthusiasm.

Just as I write this, you,
o silver tongued one, text me
to meet.

I’m going, going, not yet
completely gone.