KERRY SHAWN KEYS

 

Hole In A Drum

Brihadaranyaka Upanishad v. x

Moon, you keep bothering

my bones about. Breaking through

the rafters, riding the ridgepole,

perching at the tip of the spine 

– puffball of my brain – 

after a good rain in a stand of oak and pine,

the sun, not you, kicks us into motion.

 

Moon, you’re much more than this.

The backbone of a dogfish

that I wear in my ear, last night’s

muse’s underwear, the deathmask

of my imagination.

An academic once pointed you out

as the ghost of a rejected breast

in the calligraphy of the veins of my vagrant soul.

Love, your fingers spider

across my chest like honeysuckle.

Your tears gather

on the river of my heart

like snowfall on a raft.

Your cruelty is mine, your laughter, your love;

I am your karma. You, my unholy dove.

 

So, bless you in Winter, combing the valleys

of my pelvis, spreading your leaves

through the bone-deep freeze of all

the bodies inside mine. They thank you.

 

Bless you in Summer,

macheted coconut

in the too mortal, malignant tropics.

Soft pillow in my hammock

mocking my indolence.

 

Your speech when wordless

is a wind throwing out shadows and light,

a bull-roarer throwing out silence

pebbled with wind. A man at night if he listens

will throw himself through emptiness

and the emptiness through him.

 

Hole In A Drum   2.

Your conversation, Moon, when it finds a form

or better said a victim, is also the wind

turning into semen, turning into milk,

turning into the language of a snow-capped mountain.

 

Moon, you are a hole in a drum,

            you are a ball of silk,

            you are Hanuman on his run south,

            you are Krishna’s open mouth.

 

Before you, Moon, I am speechless

or I mumble on because your beauty

is a clear, round poem

that makes every hair stand on end,

makes the sea shudder, makes each movement

the self-conscious charade

of a man parading naked beside the bed

of a lover he’s waited a lifetime for.

 

With each gesture, he asks her in wonder:

who am I, what am I doing,

what song is this, what movie, what mirror.

 

And since she doesn’t see him in the silence

she doesn’t know to answer. 

 

Nagarjuna

Arjuna, born under a tree.

My maple all fire in the Fall?

Slithered with snakes for three months.

Rattlesnakes in these dialectics

or the hood of a cobra hiding

a world of stars?

 

Body, a pure diamond. Mind, a pure body

of discontinuous continuity.

Did he just walk down the road,

the seven wheels of his spine a walking stick?

At death, locked himself in a room,

and when the door was rolled aside,

out jumped a cicada.

 

Sunlight shines through the cicada’s wings,

and I wonder if the body left behind

is the true body, the dust of our brief dialog

with the Earth, no coming, no going.