WILLIAM KECKLER [18.602]

William Keckler

Nacido el año 1966 en Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, EE.UU., es un poeta americano y traductor.

La poesía de Keckler ha aparecido en numerosas antologías, incluyendo Isn't It Romantic: 100 Love Poems by Younger American Poets (Wave Books, NYC), In the Criminal's Cabinet (nth position, London) and poem, home: An Ars Poetica (Paper Kite Press, 2009).

Premios - Awards

2002 National Poetry Series, for Sanskrit of the Body

1994-1995 Gertrude Stein Award in Innovative American Poetry, for "One Poem"

1997 Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment on the Arts

Obras - Works

"Snow Wok", Shampoo 17

"Spring Poem," Coconut 14

"Two Poems," Free Verse

"Holding Holding" and other poems, Gut Cult

Sanskrit of the Body (2002, ISBN 978-0-14-200303-9),

Ants Dissolve in Moonlight (1995, ISBN 978-1-879193-04-8)

You name it: poehms. Logodaedalus Press. 1998. ISBN 978-0-9651401-2-6.

Traducciones - Translations

The Kingdom of Farfelu, With Paper Moons. Fugue State Press. 2005. ISBN 978-1-879193-13-0. - André Malraux's early works Royaume-Farfelu and Lunes en Papier

Los poemas han sido seleccionados por mi amigo William Keckler, para esta antología Siglo XXI. Contacto: icestationpoetry@aol.com

TWELVE POEMS  /  WILLIAM KECKLER

      from Ants Dissolve in Moonlight (1995, Fugue State Press)

      MOUNTAIN UNDER SEA

Surveying the mitered light

facing ocean

It's chiseled

calling off seconds

A mountain, its vertex

touches the reflective cloud surface

in a single point

(seems more a dream)

of dark thrust

up to break

an illusion

with solidity

a ruse

a bone

a lien

     SONAR

Because our dogs

smelled something

we followed

an olfactory trail

deep into “nowhere,”

past a ruined mill

and farmhouse

that exists only

as bounced sound

to denizen bats.

I wonder:

“Is there a trace

of intonation

to this place,

any twang of home

or dear dialect

of geometry

to these walls?”

                A  CHILD

              equilibrium of colors stationary, above a void, nets

behind the eyes, slow to turn, physical disintegration of images

in the world,           spent extravagantly metaphors

of spun gold

launched a whole field of birds

to reasonless flight

                                    to hear his voice

    from Recombinant Image Day (Broken Boulder Press, 1998)

             ANIMAL

Braced against a smudge of world

she forms phosphenes that dangle

a real game of catch

the mouth as a center

grows all the other senses

frostlike around sleep

later, we are found staring

at collisions of appetites

driver without

sounds calling

out to matter's

wry ventriloquism.

      A  BRIEF HISTORY OF US

The way the elements contain all futures

Yet all the features of the story

Diverge in synthesis

As bird songs of the Mesozoic

But where is music in the food chain?

You say this isn't a question

It is

A doorpost by which you stand

To watch the city rise

I wanted it to be vegetative

With the fuzzy logic of a field

Where we used to walk

To shape or dress our minds with images

divide the day by thousandths or millionths

This is the current belief that drives the wheel

Of resemblings you said you were

Only the last in a series

That saw form as a custom of appetite

Money as an adaptation of the eye

Death as some trader-god's commodity

All these people lying, afraid on the floor

The human exchange

   from Sanskrit of the Body (Penguin, 2003)

      JUST WATCHING AS

The clothing of the mind

dropped off. Irrefutable

is the body's boredom, before touch

asleep to the cryptic meaning

of the anatomical, it is all

colorless.

                                      Hardening,

         light strikes the object

until it swells

     full of likeness. Blood's

gorging

             of the mind. The skin,

                             a glove.

The sponge of images

   squeezes the world

                   until it oozes  Out of self

                                                 is beauty.

                   VARIANT

In the Beginning, the Garden

lay under the sea.

And it suckled space,

oh boundless

                                           forgetfulness

cold-nippled

as itself. The Snake

had no words

to grip like hands

and like Desire

it ate itself

to feel rooted,

like a Tree. Silly

seminal allegory,

semen-tasting fruit,

Death milky with fellowship

Sky welcomed then.

Yes, to feel rooted

like a tree.     Afterwords,

                    desire's brevity.

                YOU WERE THINKING HOW

Does a shell secrete mathematics

Or vice versa?

The way my sentences compose a world

Your gestures are the most creative thing

About your life you can't shape

Without language there are too many senses

And yet you don't think of yourself this way

As afraid

The business of the thing absorbs you

But, rarely, there are clots

Some we call pictures and some we don't

The way the brain curls on itself, the body

A nautilus coils like a dream

Spiraling the sounds of traffic inwards

To the still, central point

Where the sentence disappears

               THE HAND

The endlessness has nothing to do with us.

But something we can say touches it somehow,

and the gods appear for a half-life.

Soon they are gone. Only stone niches left.

Have we changed somehow a distant place?

We know our gesture ripples off.

Whether it is forever we cannot say.

Why do we wish for strangeness to be touched

when we will never know it, or it us?

                    (untitled)

A familiar voice may be parsed to infinite particles of sound

which is the hologram of thinking (as the bow of the arrow

bent back so far sensation cannot be explained by one's efforts

any longer, but seems the gift of a remote ancestor, pushing out

of bone and flesh and eye, until your thinking breaks up in the dusk

of a road without any figure, early dark of a February evening).

The sense of legend is constant time, a sacred chamber of thought

which invents meanings for differing velocities: the thickness of breathing

through the spectra of a chip of coal, for instance, in a bedroom

which is modified to fit my prehistoric modes of looking into lifelessness

that still twitches with energy, a dragonfly wing or trilobite fossil

or sudden shadow of your hand over my face, the segments of your image...

                           (untitled)

               Is it because of this, a candle's flickering,

that the room only half commits to existence, or commits

to half-existence, the way color in winter pines

still requires a hundred knife scrapes? We could continue

here, in this unheated atelier, or watch this lover purloin

color from that glass eyeball of an outdated mannequin.

She showed him a dead yellow butterfly the size

of his thumbnail, at her purse bottom, but the painter

was absorbed in grey fields beside the studio, seen 

through cracks in dirty glass, a hundred knives. Her lips

when he condemns himself to describe, and not merely

exist in monochrome, were something painful.

It reminded her that snakes could open up out of fire

the way children trample a grey paper cobra head...

                 (untitled)

And then you divide again, as water poured from a Roman aquamanile

does, or breathing on the high mesas. Extracting the thought

can be like closing a distance by sewing, as in certain old pictures,

or the boy who contemplates an x-ray of his hand side by side

with old drawings of a whale's fin, an ibis's wing, a leaf.

The word for this is homology and dreams, like water, do recycle

in nature, which we see has a rhythmic underlay so ghosts

can finger the holes. Even a single flute can shift a galaxy obliquely

                                so that all the copies come out wrong...

.