William Keckler
Nacido el año 1966 en Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, EE.UU., es un poeta americano y traductor.
La poesía de Keckler ha aparecido en numerosas antologías, incluyendo Isn't It Romantic: 100 Love Poems by Younger American Poets (Wave Books, NYC), In the Criminal's Cabinet (nth position, London) and poem, home: An Ars Poetica (Paper Kite Press, 2009).
Premios - Awards
2002 National Poetry Series, for Sanskrit of the Body
1994-1995 Gertrude Stein Award in Innovative American Poetry, for "One Poem"
1997 Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment on the Arts
Obras - Works
"Snow Wok", Shampoo 17
"Spring Poem," Coconut 14
"Two Poems," Free Verse
"Holding Holding" and other poems, Gut Cult
Sanskrit of the Body (2002, ISBN 978-0-14-200303-9),
Ants Dissolve in Moonlight (1995, ISBN 978-1-879193-04-8)
You name it: poehms. Logodaedalus Press. 1998. ISBN 978-0-9651401-2-6.
Traducciones - Translations
The Kingdom of Farfelu, With Paper Moons. Fugue State Press. 2005. ISBN 978-1-879193-13-0. - André Malraux's early works Royaume-Farfelu and Lunes en Papier
Los poemas han sido seleccionados por mi amigo William Keckler, para esta antología Siglo XXI. Contacto:icestationpoetry@aol.com
TWELVE POEMS / WILLIAM KECKLER
from Ants Dissolve in Moonlight (1995, Fugue State Press)
MOUNTAIN UNDER SEA
Surveying the mitered light
facing ocean
It's chiseled
calling off seconds
A mountain, its vertex
touches the reflective cloud surface
in a single point
(seems more a dream)
of dark thrust
up to break
an illusion
with solidity
a ruse
a bone
a lien
SONAR
Because our dogs
smelled something
we followed
an olfactory trail
deep into “nowhere,”
past a ruined mill
and farmhouse
that exists only
as bounced sound
to denizen bats.
I wonder:
“Is there a trace
of intonation
to this place,
any twang of home
or dear dialect
of geometry
to these walls?”
A CHILD
equilibrium of colors stationary, above a void, nets
behind the eyes, slow to turn, physical disintegration of images
in the world, spent extravagantly metaphors
of spun gold
launched a whole field of birds
to reasonless flight
to hear his voice
from Recombinant Image Day (Broken Boulder Press, 1998)
ANIMAL
Braced against a smudge of world
she forms phosphenes that dangle
a real game of catch
the mouth as a center
grows all the other senses
frostlike around sleep
later, we are found staring
at collisions of appetites
driver without
sounds calling
out to matter's
wry ventriloquism.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF US
The way the elements contain all futures
Yet all the features of the story
Diverge in synthesis
As bird songs of the Mesozoic
But where is music in the food chain?
You say this isn't a question
It is
A doorpost by which you stand
To watch the city rise
I wanted it to be vegetative
With the fuzzy logic of a field
Where we used to walk
To shape or dress our minds with images
divide the day by thousandths or millionths
This is the current belief that drives the wheel
Of resemblings you said you were
Only the last in a series
That saw form as a custom of appetite
Money as an adaptation of the eye
Death as some trader-god's commodity
All these people lying, afraid on the floor
The human exchange
from Sanskrit of the Body (Penguin, 2003)
JUST WATCHING AS
The clothing of the mind
dropped off. Irrefutable
is the body's boredom, before touch
asleep to the cryptic meaning
of the anatomical, it is all
colorless.
Hardening,
light strikes the object
until it swells
full of likeness. Blood's
gorging
of the mind. The skin,
a glove.
The sponge of images
squeezes the world
until it oozes Out of self
is beauty.
VARIANT
In the Beginning, the Garden
lay under the sea.
And it suckled space,
oh boundless
forgetfulness
cold-nippled
as itself. The Snake
had no words
to grip like hands
and like Desire
it ate itself
to feel rooted,
like a Tree. Silly
seminal allegory,
semen-tasting fruit,
Death milky with fellowship
Sky welcomed then.
Yes, to feel rooted
like a tree. Afterwords,
desire's brevity.
YOU WERE THINKING HOW
Does a shell secrete mathematics
Or vice versa?
The way my sentences compose a world
Your gestures are the most creative thing
About your life you can't shape
Without language there are too many senses
And yet you don't think of yourself this way
As afraid
The business of the thing absorbs you
But, rarely, there are clots
Some we call pictures and some we don't
The way the brain curls on itself, the body
A nautilus coils like a dream
Spiraling the sounds of traffic inwards
To the still, central point
Where the sentence disappears
THE HAND
The endlessness has nothing to do with us.
But something we can say touches it somehow,
and the gods appear for a half-life.
Soon they are gone. Only stone niches left.
Have we changed somehow a distant place?
We know our gesture ripples off.
Whether it is forever we cannot say.
Why do we wish for strangeness to be touched
when we will never know it, or it us?
(untitled)
A familiar voice may be parsed to infinite particles of sound
which is the hologram of thinking (as the bow of the arrow
bent back so far sensation cannot be explained by one's efforts
any longer, but seems the gift of a remote ancestor, pushing out
of bone and flesh and eye, until your thinking breaks up in the dusk
of a road without any figure, early dark of a February evening).
The sense of legend is constant time, a sacred chamber of thought
which invents meanings for differing velocities: the thickness of breathing
through the spectra of a chip of coal, for instance, in a bedroom
which is modified to fit my prehistoric modes of looking into lifelessness
that still twitches with energy, a dragonfly wing or trilobite fossil
or sudden shadow of your hand over my face, the segments of your image...
(untitled)
Is it because of this, a candle's flickering,
that the room only half commits to existence, or commits
to half-existence, the way color in winter pines
still requires a hundred knife scrapes? We could continue
here, in this unheated atelier, or watch this lover purloin
color from that glass eyeball of an outdated mannequin.
She showed him a dead yellow butterfly the size
of his thumbnail, at her purse bottom, but the painter
was absorbed in grey fields beside the studio, seen
through cracks in dirty glass, a hundred knives. Her lips
when he condemns himself to describe, and not merely
exist in monochrome, were something painful.
It reminded her that snakes could open up out of fire
the way children trample a grey paper cobra head...
(untitled)
And then you divide again, as water poured from a Roman aquamanile
does, or breathing on the high mesas. Extracting the thought
can be like closing a distance by sewing, as in certain old pictures,
or the boy who contemplates an x-ray of his hand side by side
with old drawings of a whale's fin, an ibis's wing, a leaf.
The word for this is homology and dreams, like water, do recycle
in nature, which we see has a rhythmic underlay so ghosts
can finger the holes. Even a single flute can shift a galaxy obliquely
so that all the copies come out wrong...
.