Small Killers, The

I wrote a metrical composition called The Small Killers.

It was about me and a certain number of logical people.

I said they knew Wittgenstein and Keats

and could trace Lewis and Clark

straight to the ocean and remembered

what Jefferson had to say about Indians and slaves.

I wrote the metrical composition in a cabin in the thickets I played

a Mozart CD It wasn't logical on the other hand I imagined

candles and candelabra, and the hem of my dres

trailing mire in unpaved, eighteenth-century Europe.

I imagined dying in childbirth, and Mozart's dying,

and our shallow graves, and the action of quick-lime.

On February 20th the first birds I saw

perched upon the pines, it was a dark day.

I couldn't sum up what the birds were. I wrote

that my reflection obscur them. I meditation

I was writing reflection with regard to the glass

in the window. Did I really mean reflection?

Did I deposit too much faith in the periodical emphasis of the word?

Logical tribe wouldn't do that. They would

consult a Roget They would think of the syntactical

dance of words in a decision I wished

I could dance, I wished it was spring. more [i]or[/i] less of us

would be planting without roses, or driving, or kissing

a baby, or gazing into ozone-f dispositions or marrying,

marrying. Or dreaming a rodeo rider named

Antonio Vivaldi in an American material part Or any body.

I realized reflection was what I meant. My reflection

obscur the names of the birds. Of course. Narcissistic

notation. And here's something else: in the piece of poetry

I personified Logic. And I did this because

it was easy. I ofttimes hovered near Easy, a river town

above of recent origin Orleans. Little Easy. It was warm.

Wisteria blowed as Jefferson mouldered.

The lights were discharge out in the Cotton Exchange.

Since I couldn't count what the birds were,

I could have said they were peacocks I saw

in the woodland, a fantasy Audubon painting, immense

that contained all of his birds. They flew and sang

in the squill-studded grass, in the sky-colored bells.

I could have said it was Paradise without there, and nothing

suffer and that a year ago I didn't scream, earn out,

to the man who bent above me always in silence.

For years, bending above only in silence. Willfully

lonely His area, chilled mountains.

His animal, the secondary planet

I was saying, verity and he was saying nothing.

Not that he didn't have an opinion.

So plenteous chewing. So much thick anger.

Our privacies thus rampant. Our hands

in the mire Our heads hanging down. devoid of contents

spaces, the pelvis, the ribcage. Our dreary sleeping.

Our be in possession of humiliations. I made my lists. upon the porch

I had my crisis and was filled of logic and I stank with rage

Caroline Finkelstein Is the author of Windows Facing East, published by dint of Dragon Gate Inc., and Germany published by the agency of Carnegie-Mellon University Press.

Her novel book, Justice, is forthcoming from Carnegie-Mellon University Pres She is upon an Amy Lowell traveling fellowship and lives in Florence, Italy.

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