CHRISTOPHER T. KEAVENEY - POEMS

Christopher T. Keaveney teaches Japanese language and East Asian culture at Linfield College in Oregon and is the author of four books about Japanese culture and East Asian cultural relations. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Columbia Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, The Minetta Review, Stolen Island, Faultline, Wilderness House Literary Review, and elsewhere, and he is the author of the collection Your Eureka not Mined (Broadstone Books, 2017).

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​DYLAN THOMAS TIPSY

​Hardwired for the tailspin, 
I submit to yet another tour of the States 
because the bills
don't pay themselves,
loonier forms
of Yank indignation
than the homerun trot,
my birthright
sluiced to a wince,
what the critics back home
describe as 
the preexisting condition.
Stymied by a drunken ruckus
on Houston 
I take my nightly constitutional
down Canal instead, 
virtually renewing old acquaintances
in the stairwell,
a custom
as cozy as the whammy bar.
 
This is where art steps in. Lovely Rita,
you'd know her if you saw 
her and I'm not kidding,
the provocation of the uncovered ankle.
The girl who knew stasis when stasis 
was the only game in town,
pronounces me
too damn serious for the overcoat
and for the buckled shoes which present
an entirely different set of problems
in the bathroom stall,
the arc of the angel mired
in the belly flop.
 
Whitehorse
where trouble always finds me
in tweed,
another would-be approaches me
before the last call
to bum a cigarette.
I write my number
on his girlfriend’s palm,
too eagerly he quotes lines from poems of mine
written when I was a twenty-something,
now that's what I call
an intercession,
lilies for the gilding
and the pronounced glottal stop
that can only be understood
parsed half to death
as the necessary predisposition 
for an even higher calling.
 

​ANOTHER IN A LONG LINE OF DOLEFUL DAYS
FOR THE CANDLESTICK MAKER

​Stuck in the one place in New Jersey
where George Washington may not
have slept,
I find myself again
subject to the approval
of the heavy brass,
which is to say
the band was indeed all there,
gathered around the dying patriarch
proud even now
of the pig Latin
in which he could both curse
and pray.
He had been informed
that he and his wife of fifty years 
looked more like brother
and sister than husband and wife.
Imagine that
and while you are at it
imagine a sky bereft
of clouds
even as the old man decides 
to keep on living despite himself,
despite the certainty of the prognosis,
and the efficacy of the machines arrayed
to carry him across
to the other side.
I recognize that morning clearly now
for what it was,
my last shot at reconciliation 
with my dying father,
as subtle as the bell bottoms
that were just one of many forms of rebellion,
as discrete as the
ourishflay ofway ethay assbray ectionsay.
 

​HEMLOCK

​I

​I found country comfort
in the old Volvo,
windows rolled down
in another small act of defiance,
static for company,
the albatross plush won at the church bazaar
to pimp the rearview,
and the fraying memento mori
of the rope coiled beside me
on the passenger seat,
brazen reminders
of the complicity of alone time
like the dashboard buttons
that lent themselves to your pushiness
on trips along winding roads
to and from town.
​

II

​Such incidents are much less common
these days than you'd think,
first you forgave me for the flamenco
on the very night we watched the meteor shower
in its entirety
from the relative safety
of the little league diamond,
then you turned on me
as if kinks to iron out
meant as little as chain link
or that my father’s indifference to you
could be resolved by looking
beyond the swaying furs on Opossum Hill.
You threw my well-worn copy of Finnegan’s Wake
out into the muck
and condemned my entire record collection
for skipping
in all the wrong places
as if on cue,
as if I had willed it,
and I virtually had to beg you 
not to hate the Carpenters,
who were after all
my first real teachers
and the sole witnesses
to the events of that night.
 

III

​In our final hours together
sitting beside the lake
you saw me for what I was,
the only one who didn’t cop a key to the city,
a man made complete
only by his pettiness,
which amounted to an obsession
with the smallest detail,
to wit
your graduation photo crumpled in my fist
when they found me
sitting cross-legged on the hood
with the engine idling,
the prospect of time served
for having reinvented the wheel,
and the salmon
of the sky at dawn
the one thing from that day
that they couldn’t wrest from me.
 

IV

​the numbness begins as a bludgeon
on the sides of the tongue,
a tingling in the fingers
as the poison kicks in,
an itch behind the fingernails
that dig into the chair’s
tattered arms.
There are records of confusion
when the condemned reach this point,
rambling confessions
and the inevitable glassy eyed stare
almost a silver screen affectation,
and always the itch 
and the consolation of befuddlement.
How badly I want this nosebleed
to mean something
more than the poke of crocus
through the early spring snow,
the snowman
having finally mastered
the art of running in place.
 
 

​IT HAD TO BE COUNTED A ROUSING SUCCESS

​(albeit for all the wrong reasons.)
(albeit the no-frills version.)
(albeit a third again the calories.)
(albeit only in batting practice.)
(albeit rattan.)
(albeit the made for TV version.)
(albeit a totally convincing cover band.)
(albeit the product of fracking.)
(albeit an acceptable level of collateral damage.)
(albeit using the less orthodox spelling.)
(albeit in 1/16 scale.)
(albeit without the maracas.)
(albeit in the less common gaseous state.)
(albeit with only the one glass slipper.)
(albeit based on the less satisfying prewar translation.)
(albeit under slightly modified club rules.)
(albeit clearly pirated.)
(albeit having disregarded “Simon says” completely.)
(albeit sans the fanfare and the ticker tape.)
(albeit “rousing” in the archaic sense of burnt to a crisp and “success” in name only.)