POEMS
BY
KIM KERZE
5
Picture from Elsa Dorfman’s Housebook
Of Corso
He was on the run
before he could
crawl. He learnt to ski in the most
unlikeliest of places.
Four walls
blessed him with
Shelley, Chatterton
Dostoievsky; a grand inquistive dose of liberty
which he sucked
in like oxygen.
a nearby
muse, noticing
the sprinkled colour sleeping under his fingernails
dorment from the days when
childhood hands
were plunged
into confectionary
leant
closer &
breathed in his ear, the mildest
of
infatuations.
the poet’s
chatter
slowed like an
unplugged engine fan
& in a fit of
wonder
he opened the
door
turned into the
night, & slipped
Down a back
alley to hide in a drainpipe.
Here he found a dozen
lost watches
& a plane ticket to
His breadth deepened
& his technique
alembic
conjured such
delicacy
from the
simplest picture
of a
flower or a snow owl
that people of
all sizes
Stood on
Street corners, givng away his poems.
He learnt to attenuate
silence
to command an
audience into feeling
the dust upon
a manuscript
He had a regal poise
& even his drunken
annunciations could stun
any adversary.
When we found him, he
was slumped
in a movie
theatre - a Fellini retrospective -
the projector
jammed midscene in La Strada
as a curly
haired tightropewalker
persists in coaxing
out an inner clown
made of
laughter
& Giullietta Masina
is smiling in
perfect gratitude
there seemed few
clues to suggest
any last
minute atonement took place, although
by leaning
closer & observing the line that
curves
up from the
man’s lips one does sense a trace of a shared
intimate joke. Did
he know the Pope read his poems
bathed in a
wreath of syrupy golden light? A chain
of angels
whispering from the highest council!
Of
course so!
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