Tim Kahl (3 poems)
The Water Pageant
The negroes of Angola were capturing mermaids
and eating them. We saw their bones dumped
in the shallows, and because we believed
every person who had a title on land
also had a counterpart in the sea, we looked
for the plastic cross of the fish-bishop
floating on the waves. But it was never
found among the graves of kelp on
the surface where we netted minnows.
The iridescent film of the gas spill
dazzled our eyes as we strengthened
the breakers for the water pageant.
This year it was rumored the commission
was coming. They came. They saw.
They condescended to our backwater charms.
Afterwards it was illegal to speak of
mermaids when the commission
announced they were only fables.
On the maps we couldn't find any
place called Angola either. Our ears
rang with their most popular edict:
conform, conform to more profitable ways.
A Family of Conifers
I was born into a family of conifers,
into a species that confounded the taxonomists.
They were not very good at recognizing our kind.
The cones we dropped were merely hints
for the picnickers in the grove to see
we were not the stuff of lumber.
We were not suited for fire either.
Bad wood don’t burn we’d say until
the novice campers would believe it
or one of them would once again
mistake my uncle for a Sitka spruce.
They’d curse his useless corpse,
mutter that his trunk wasn’t good enough
to grow fungus. Then they’d come
for my sister, insisting she was cedar.
My redwood father and Bishop pine mother
could not move, froze as I recall it,
and I grew up between the seedlings and
the tall mature trees, a bit too
philosophical and dreamy, I guess.
I thought about my life as human,
how I’d used my forest family
to project my hurt for all those years.
I should have thought of them as
beautiful or useful instead.
It’s their hidden lives I attend to now
as I gaze at their blankness from the trail.
I want to intrude upon their quiet middle,
pass through into the years circling
their core and emerge on the other side
of the divide into unseen history.
There I can escape my fatigue with
the visible. Or is my reason to find
the handle of the divine, even if
it’s a god whose pinched life and
monstrous manner force me to
dance with him all night long.
Reformation Dance
The peasants danced at the carnival.
The giant strode across the river
with the Christ child on his back.
The mercenary rode off to war,
dagger dangling between his legs.
I stood by the cuckold who roamed
the village looking for the joker
who had put a cock’s comb in his sack.
The bearded man rehearsed the vows
learned from the missing monk.
No one had seen him since
we got news of the revolution
in heaven. When we saw the fifers
had been cast out and fallen back
to earth, our hopes were dashed.
There would be no music in
the moonlight, no mournful ballad
to recount our tragic ways.
Our steps would need to be light
for the rest of our merciful days.
Then the church forbade our twirling
during the allemande because the women
wore no underpants. So we took to
the ländler, the hopser, leaping around
like idiots after butter. Some day we
would make it to our solemn heaven
and plead for darkness to descend upon
our ears. A weight upon our countenance!
A blight upon our souls!
These are the credentials that led us
to be more dubious of happy fools.
Tim Kahl [http://www.timkahl.com] is the author of Possessing Yourself (CW Books, 2009), The Century of Travel (CW Books, 2012) The String of Islands (Dink, 2015) and Omnishambles (Bald Trickster, 2019). His work has been published in Prairie Schooner, Drunken Boat, Mad Hatters' Review, Indiana Review, Metazen, Ninth Letter, Sein und Werden, Notre Dame Review, The Really System, Konundrum Engine Literary Magazine, The Journal, The Volta, Parthenon West Review, Caliban and many other journals in the U.S. He is also editor of Clade Song [http://www.cladesong.com]. He is the vice president and events coordinator of The Sacramento Poetry Center. He also has a public installation in Sacramento {In Scarcity We Bare The Teeth}. He plays flutes, guitars, ukuleles, charangos and cavaquinhos. He currently teaches at California State University, Sacramento, where he sings lieder while walking on campus between classes.