Three Poems by David Keplinger

Deduction

In order to deduct the costs of his office
he had to measure it well and he did,
starting with the window where the sun
shined through the winter trees, spoked
with branches. The sun was one centimeter
thereabouts, and the square of the window
it shined through, the size of a picture
frame. Under the window was a desk
which would have been about the shape
of a six-month-old Polish elk, its head lowered
in the carpet’s scythed grass, but the desk
was red, a kind of unnatural cherry red,
so it would have to be called a large
stripped carcass on the tax form. A lamp,
the only artificial fluorescence in the room.
It had two small columns like the portico
of the Temple of Minerva. It was the size
of the end of a tiny harpoon. The chair
could not be mistaken for anything
but tombstone from the back. From the front
it was a child pushing two hands on the ground,
about to stand up for the first time.
And he deducted himself, the size of
a man at the beginning of the end of
a story, the part where the thing inside him
is given shape in how he describes the sound
of a flute being played by a neighbor, the
cubit or so that held the breath, the fathoms
of the workings of that instrument.

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MARGINALIA FROM MY
NORTON ANTHOLOGY
OF POETRY

1. Falling (1967)

Over Kansas tonight she    is falling
through the freezing cold air    through clouds
storing up        their milk’s        unseen electricity

still alive       with long hair         a backbone no
wings and it is not God         it is otherwise
like any night in Kansas     with the ploughshares

tunneling toward the past    and the airplane sailing
calmly on        and a pond          she seems to aim for
with her legs      like in Breughel         kicking at the air

2. The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner (1945)

Almost anything I could say is a complaint.
A little cough, and death throws open the hatch.
Even hope is a kind of complaint,
they kindly explained to me after.

3. September 1, 1939 (1940)

In some crummy joint
on 52nd street
I was sitting next to
an odd drunk with a ballpoint
who was scribbling away
while on the radio
a murmuring announcer
went about denouncing
the leaders of the day.
Someone shouted news
into the doors, dismayed
like the announcer was,
who got back to his list
of this week’s Hit Parade.
The eggs and brittle toast,
already they were cold,
and the place was dead
already; at barely one,
the clock ticked correct
for the wreck of Jersey City,
where the thin pine walls
with their mottled glass
and the little clock were grown.
Smoke rose from the oven
through a kind of flue
up to the shingled eaves
and I could see the cook
flash his butcher’s blade
as the heat around his apron
raised a long white tail
against the afternoon.

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