Scott Keeney


Invictus, I Guess

Into the day, dark day, that uncovers me—
the landscape, duh, won’t be speaking 
for itself. Sorry, I parked the details in 
the river’s garage. My feet are muddy 
but implied. I still eat meat. I’m still 
not proud.
                      And in the end 
                      what you do
                      is say something
                      wise. That’s all.
Birds’ wings.      
                       Pages flap. 
                                          I am not 
an installation. 
                         Or maybe I am. 
                                                    Who knows
the sunlight is another kind of water—
THE DIVINE RED WAGON      earth-scraping 
knuckles and apple seeds. The mouth 
moves and sounds 
                               the mouse of being.
And yet, the indifference of the grass
still green: it won’t find us alright.
Cold leaves and ragged wind
I close my eyes and listen to behold
the Scott Keeney that is not here 
and the Scott Keeney that is . . . 
Booyah!      I am      the corporal of my soul.

Why Are Some Things Fragments

Don’t get me started on the hollow core
of tomorrow. Darkness sleeps in
words, passive, waiting to be woken by
two kids doing it on a headstone
in the cemetery where people turn to clouds.

Light is no happiness
thrust into the mouth of morning. Light
is a straightjacket, wet as glue,
disguised in someday’s splendid perfume.
Light is a switch, a scissor, an axis.

But all is not—the smooth mouth of tomorrow
opening around the omniscience
of kids too dumb to care
about balance and nightfall and stairs—
cold milk, some thought
of a thimble, lost like a variant spelling
of stone—a motor car in a jar.



Dear Reader

I am determined to tell you the truth
about something. I don’t yet know
what it is. Bold spirit? Not so much.
A moody music is no hard target,
but I wanted to be free from words.
We are subject to the stars, always
imagining limits and no limits alike.
The rickety mind, sunny side up
in time. Feel, burn, and stay in
my corner. Silver petals, 40,000
years, an octopus suffers no fools—
these things are not secrets. We
begin in the early black snow of old
and end, the bees of night around us.



Wahoo Sunset

We know the dark side of the sun; in fact,
like the back of a Stratocaster slung low
to rest against a blue-jeaned thigh, it is felt,
the way a crab feels the tide, or construction paper
feels a magic marker. Driving the interstate
toward you, wahoo lake in the sky—I want only
to wrap my car around your telephone pole,
no brakes, no airbag, no seat belt on,
the way the aluminum zirconium clouds
rub the hairy curvatures of the earth
to dry the overwhelming question from
our minds, “as if,” the way a nasal spray
helps one breathe, puts a body back in place
like Hey now, I think you know what I mean.
It's 6:53 in Hollywood, Connecticut, but I
never put down my cold incendiary desire
to smash every mirror in which I appear
without you, the one I love, standing beside me.
Point of fact: We don't know the luminous ball
of burning gas, no matter how many NASA craft
we launch into orbit to photo-shoot its stormy
displays. Love, if you can hear me, meet me
at that dark point of departure where we end
and begin, for both are grace. It's nice to know
there's an excess of meaning in the world
the way we flower our brick when we seed.
“Hey, it's a bird,” the mother says. “It's a person
dressed as a bird,” her seven year old replies,
and just like that, as simple and bewildering
as osmosis, we finger-cross into the future
and we look back at our tawdry selves, fringed
with nostalgia, green around the edges, harsh
and smiling and leaning over the fountain
at a festival in the park where the voices drift
like pine needles, layering the wet ground.
Don't step in the mud, but we step in the mud
out of share delinquency or core forgetfulness.
The wandering spider of I think you know—
late gossamer sunshine, let me pass through,
let Scott Christopher Keeney move into
that opposite earth on the dark side of the sun
where he will be a better, more thoughtful and
willing-to-act-on-it soul. Love, my sloe-eyed nucleosynthesis,
be the doe slowly approaching to lick the lake
and break the spell of the clouds in excelsis
until wahoo sunset, burning bush on high,
a bare-knuckled feeling from the sun's dark side
clocks us like a clothesline from the turnbuckle sky.




Scott Keeney has had works in Otoliths 23 and 27.
 
 
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