February 2015
Author's Note: Prose poems interest me because they aren’t bound by lineation and look like paragraphs while incorporating all the special techniques and qualities of traditional verse. Prose poems work through complete sentences, deliberate fragments, the language of dreams, and a nod to the surreal.
Traditionally, February is the “month of love,” but where I live, it’s often a month of intense cold and snow. So … instead of love poems, here are two deep winter prose poems from A Lightness, A Thirst, or Nothing At All (my forthcoming book).
Traditionally, February is the “month of love,” but where I live, it’s often a month of intense cold and snow. So … instead of love poems, here are two deep winter prose poems from A Lightness, A Thirst, or Nothing At All (my forthcoming book).
C h a u c e r K e n n y
No Other World
Chaucer sits on my lap, both of us “sighing from time to time” with Charles Simic’s “My Turn to Confess.” Chaucer lifts one ear and turns his head from side to side. His tail wags. He likes this poet’s voice, so I play the recording again. Sad title, crooked branch. It is winter; it is cold, too late for leaves, only a thin sun over the yard—the old pin oak and the bird in it, the tamarack’s shadow in deeper shade. Cloud and wind … the furnace hums …
Chaucer sits on my lap, both of us “sighing from time to time” with Charles Simic’s “My Turn to Confess.” Chaucer lifts one ear and turns his head from side to side. His tail wags. He likes this poet’s voice, so I play the recording again. Sad title, crooked branch. It is winter; it is cold, too late for leaves, only a thin sun over the yard—the old pin oak and the bird in it, the tamarack’s shadow in deeper shade. Cloud and wind … the furnace hums …
The Way A Soul
Snow rises on a base of ice—twilight all day. Now, the oaks are layered, the pines a ragged wall. The wind takes its work into drifts and fills a squirrel’s nest high in the maple (packed leaves over twigs, deeply covered). In this kind of snow, the world loses shape the way a soul loses itself to something greater. The moon slides sideways across the sky, its nimbus thin. My breath’s reverse silhouette settles its white against the dark.
©2015 Adele Kenny