claudia keelan

Little Elegy (New Orleans and Biloxi)

The divinity leaking
           The living lose
Whole cities to force
Leaky Jesus
           Fallen from his human mother
A series of days          All category 3
Depictions of catastrophe
           Pharaoh’s drowning army
Strewn beaches after any number
           Of huge waves
The frigidity of the wave in Japanese painting
           & interpretation of blame
The kinetics of every day
Moving through each of us
Self such a small arc in the tapestry
Though the trope of the infant and mother
Pleased me more than the hunt
What I was “about”
           When I was about
Traceable in the journals destroyed
Every one of them, his wife reports in Biloxi
By a force only fourth
In the record of such force
What is it “about”
           When it is about?

 

Little Elegy (1977-1991)

The world was strong
The world was very strong
The peregrine gnashed
In the peregrination’s dream
Words in the hallways
Your cough is a machine
Imagine, she’s finally a sexy teenager
At 46, and her grown-up boyfriends
Summon her shape in People magazine
This is a focus group
This is a granting organization
The inside of a car
An animal is a hurt
Hurt inside your shoulder and thigh
I’m throwing pills over a bridge
Things got as ugly
As cherries on a billboard
I slept on the oily river and watched the fires
No one chose me
Particularly the world, sunning its muscle on the lawn
Speaking as a gladiator
I felt fine
The falcons and hawks
The solar roadrunner
Dropped mice blithely into the pool
Their ghosts blotted out the steam shovels
Mile by mile

We dusk