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Eleison

Keith Kurzman

1. Beekeeper

She chews aconite and betelnuts,
spits mercury into an empty can.
Hammers wheel by like applecarts
as the hunger-man rises over an oak.

Morning Susan fills her jar.
Silver fibers choke the wind
and a grinning jaguar spatters
espresso on the gravel.

Hungrier than Gods,
they suck paint off arabesques
and dervish into the dust,
muddy and exalted as children.

2.
Bells echo in a felt gas chamber.
Clocks spill out onto a tarp.
The gold-fingered acrobat
scampers past a bust of Adam.

3. Matador

The jealous murmur beneath burqas
that shine like Ark light in the halls of no catastrophe.
There is no mastery here, no angelic order:
only a jug of oats and lilac.

From his arbor in Asturias, blooming and simple,
he entreats Netzach: it is a cormorant.
Fuddle-fingered and sweaty: it is a wren.
It is a terrier that plucks the ice out of cathedrals.

Venal scrapers and grandees scramble past
as coteries of mavens sprawl
through yards fouled with sawdust,
worse than guile poured over a kiss

4.
This morning a hornet
Tore the wig off a corrupt judge.
Ugly cannibals chuck brass saucers
into the fireplace, vicious.

5. Fisherman

Go on and swim back to your telestial, go.
I dangled for a totem,
caught only split and burned
patches of keel.

Clutches of aspic strain and paw
and your proverbs smack like planks
on a canal through a church,
or only a tennis court.

Orchids grandstand and snarl,
but only for a moment:
Father tucks the shore in a box
and commits it to the sky.