The riddle of a storefront

THREE POEMS

by David Keplinger

Beatification

            The only soul                      who beatifies itself

             is the lightening bug                      of North America

also called firefly               also called

Half-in-love                                     with-dusty-death

also called slant-                 of-light also known

as Hobo-who-believes-he's-Jesus

and You-                              oh-my-soul

which announces                            its coming greased

with luceferin: Never         venerate yourself

in the presence                                of children

is the lesson here                the flashing timed

metronomically                             which enables the child

to track you                         to follow the rhythm

snap his fist                                   and squeeze

R

It was a language of white hills, red brick towns.

An alley was a comma in the agony's grammar.

It was the old one tied against a chair, madness swelling like a thought

too big for her head, and each death was a period. The mortician

a stain, a drop of ink in his black suit, before

a page-white mausoleum. It was a language

of yeast soup, snowy hills, towns called Beauty and Cold,

where even the names of things had a kind of corresponding

order, beauty always going cold, always losing itself

to something permanent. There was fish at the fishmonger,

paper at the paper store. Time at the clockmaker's shop.

There were syntactical surprised: the headmaster turned janitor 

in a matter of a day, the ambassador

seen on the subway in tattered clothes, the president

dressed as a prisoner, delivering his acceptance speech,

the secret police dressed as tourists on their own beat.

But mostly it was a language one used when speaking

in a whisper, rolling the “R,” practicing the “R” in your mouth

until it dropped from the palette to the tongue

as from the pocket of God, and hung there momentarily

in its shiny majesty, a sound much older than the language

that spent it, that offered it from mouth

to mouth like money.

A City I'm Traveling To

No solution hath the riddle of a storefront.

Its awnings billow up in wind and light

The waiters in their tiny jackets pull

Their jackets sown against the sudden cold.

A servant bears a latched up trunk, ruefully,

ruefully! And a certain old woman is waiting

To sell me a flower: to offer it with one hand,

To cover her teeth with the other.

From The American Poetry Review, September-October 2014.