Three Poems, Michael Begnal

 

Room 14

 

Someone’s in the other room,

the one across the hall,

*having a nervous breakdown*

and also making calls

(to Medea?), trying

to keep themself alive—

 

but in this room,

such gloom has passed,

and there is only

the white fitted mask of years,

the pages amassed,

and that kind of jive—

 

or, there is gloom too

sometimes, or soon: a trip ends,

the next one never begins,

yet the lens or mirror

remains un-cracked in here,

but it warps, slightly, in waves

 

•

 

Someone fumbling with a key,

a metal key, not a card,

in the doorknob lock

 

across the hall—what awaits

inside that other room—

love, a hag, a dagger?

 

I’ll not know, I’ll not

peek out along the brightly

lighted carpeting, the beige

 

walls freshly painted—

no, not fucking with that

now, I got the lean of the lines,

 

and the white-footed hind

dwells in here with me,

in no other room but mine

Entrance

 

The afternoon rhythmed brightness

in what felt to be

must have been Santa Fe,

its old cobblestone lanes,

adobes, its flats

in the colonial-era Spanish style:

 

outside the open portico

entrance of my flat,

families strolling

on the streets,

the hillèd pathways,

in black formal attire

 

 

     —flying in, many-hued,

the hummingbird pair

flits among the rafters,

and the two bats appear,

one getting in my hair

the other down my shirt,

 

disentangled finally,

they perch upon my hands,

peering at me

 

with sapphiric ocean-eyes

 

 

 

 

Light

 

Working with the medium

of light in the body,

waves on wet air

 

my work taken up

in an attuned essay titled

“Sun and Moon and Emptiness”

 

published in an anthology

called Spontaneous Oaks:

Art against Life,

 

by which the editors mean

not “against life” per se

but rather

 

the shit

the system yokes you with

(yes, “the system” is

 

still a serviceable term)—

the essay’s author

remains anonymous, dark

 

 

Michael Begnal is the author of the collections Future Blues (Salmon Poetry, 2012) and Ancestor Worship (Salmon Poetry, 2007), as well as the chapbooks Tropospheric Clouds (Adjunct Press, 2020) and The Muddy Banks (Ghost City Press, 2016). He has also written a critical monograph, The Music and Noise of the Stooges, 1967-71: Lost in the Future (Routledge, 2022). Twitter: @Michael_Begnal  // Web: http://mikebegnal.blogspot.com/