John Kannenberg: Poems

Lamp during daylight
burns brighter for a moment
blinks off, unnoticed.





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shooting star in a sidewalk sky





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In the grey clearing under a canopy of pine, oak, and maple
we walked on brown needles
until crispy leaves, now forgotten by their branches, 
began to fall around us and
I stopped.

I had to listen.

The silent flutterings, invisible impacts melting 
into the undergrowth
were lost upon the bird and the lonely car off in the distance
both deaf to this momentary theater of slow motion gravity.

You kept walking, but I wasn’t alone.

Our isolation
was a ligature
connecting no-sight and no-sound:
a fragile ball of sibilating yarn unwound
within the labyrinth grooves
(dusty, sedimentary)
stretched between the things
that you never heard
and I never saw.





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/

A breeze, not yet brumal
sprinkled across our fingers like the leaves of an unfinished book
as we stared at massing clouds:

wispy tortoises
fuzzy elephants
nebulous rabbits

the nearly imperceptible glissade of an impossible bestiary
backed by a soundtrack of airplanes, helicopters,
and psithurism.

//

The sun was rising
but our ears ignored cycles
of rise and fall, off and on;
the auricular is always there even when the luminous is not.

///

Beneath the trees, a curious scent of pepper
brushed against suppressed fire
as if the petioles of the forest’s offspring would spark
when we stepped on them;
they popped like
microscopic
firecrackers
in any case.

Within waterless eddies of that frosty wind
they danced around our feet
in imperfect circles
begging us to join them
if only we would listen.





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The glowing full moon hummed,
following me as I walked
past the buzzing street light
under the whooshing train on the rattling tracks
and around the man with the clicking cigarette lighter.





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--John Kannenberg