Guest Poet: Steve Klepetar

Embassy

Here in the leaden world, all bets are off.
Cancel the juggler, let the clowns go home.

Last night I tumbled down a hole, swam
gurgling out the other side, breathing

through iridescent gills. My fingerprints
turned purple-black as Concord grapes.

I spoke the language of rapid turns –
glittering verbs, nouns floating in vast

green patches beneath sharp screeching gulls.
Now I recall sinuous shape of green vines,

how memory blames in rocket flares.
Light a fire and pledge your time to every

breath, palms pressed hard against your
bench of oak. Be the door you storm through,

lace your fiery eyes to bristling bandoliers.
Who will ride with you, breaking clumps

of earth along jagged trails? Here on this desert
highway, with nothing in the air but wind-swept
sand and shimmering silence of heat, what fool
would drag your embassy to the empty-handed sun?

It's No Surprise

It’s no surprise that you can
hear subtle shades of sound

in the quiet between
words
or that the simplest

glass spends vibrations
that glow in golden waves.

You knew that even
when your hair was black

and you lived in tangled
roots beneath the garden

wall. When frogs rise
from muddy
graves, even the sun

knows where fruit
trees bloom, where

carpenters whisper soft
as saws barely touching
the flesh of wood.

I have melted the gold

in my pockets, those coins acrid
with the sweat of palms and gathered
bulging class rings
and whatever I could find of long, spidery
chains, piled them in heaps, pitched
each gleaming ingot deep down in the furnace’s white heart.

Honey-bright rivulets flow
into the mold where, for safety’s sake
I keep your face
and where your hands have blossomed
into leaves above lithe and outstretched arms.

I have listened to the roar of your father’s
storm-wild song, his mournful ode to roots
and rough bark, and light green golden leaves
rustling forever in the wind of his cold and dying breath.

© Steve Klepetar 2011

Steve Klepetar’s work has received several Pushcart and Best of the Net nominations. His chapbook, Thirty-six Crows, was published last summer by erbacce press.
Here is a link to his web page: http://web.stcloudstate.edu/sfklepetar/