At last, the extremes
of his present methods
seemed to offer
the happiest avenues.
The strengthening
of even a single cell
might become as much
as new knowledge
where ratty camouflage
is ripped aside
revealing a real veldt
to hold him as surely
across as up and down
in its green organization.
THESE LINES
These lines are like
a general to his troops,
troops we must be
thought of as actually
being there unless he’s
a very special general.
The odds, however long,
are not what impels us,
but the guarantee of failure,
the foolishness of arranging
bouquets, the lovemaking
of less and less as stem
is jammed onto stem.
THE NOTEBOOK
This new notebook.
I can’t wait
to begin messing it up.
Actually, I’ve stopped twice
during this sentence,
which contains two sentences,
to watch an old woman
in a sari looking down severely
who suddenly shuts the window
and brings the whole thing
to a close.
The sentence is
the biggest fiction.
Murder may have been done.
Sure, I want to write as I breathe,
to push words out of me
the way my guts are tied.
Should I take tent stakes
and bang them into steel?
Or wring rainwater
out of the fog?
Jim Klein has published more than 100 poems in publications including The Berkeley Review, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Joe Soap’s Canoe, Oxford Magazine, The Plastic Tower, Onthebus, Pulpsmith, andGandhabba; he has been published many times in The Wormwood Review, including a Feature Section. He has also published articles inThe Christian Century, James Joyce Quarterly, and College English. He founded two literary magazines, Lunch, at Fairleigh Dickinson University, Rutherford, NJ, in the seventies, and currently The Rutherford Red Wheelbarrow. Blue Chevies, his first book, came out in September 2008, and To Eat Is Human Digest Divine in 2009.
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