Three Poems by David Keplinger

Driving Through Kansas at Night

Why must some sorrows go on forever,
The grief you can’t let go of
Like the piece of broken furniture
In which you kept your first books,

Or the moon that follows brightly
Through clouds on route 70 while somewhere
Someone is still suffering, remembering again
The illness they’ll have to get up

And look at again in the mirror.
Coleman Hawkins plays Body and Soul
For the ten millionth time and it is still good:
So it continues playing on this station

For as long as it stays good, as the corn mills
Stream by through small towns like clouds,
And the faces in the all night restaurants
Glance up as you pass.

Pit Bull

Aware of the smell of burning meat
at the food truck two blocks away
what can it do but tense its leash
and hunker into this breathlessness,

this feast of great thirst. Strung to a chair leg
while she blows a kiss and steps inside
for a drink, it stands there, not unlike
a doomed philosopher exhorting

his final argument to patrons of this little
outdoor Senate under the sun, until, convincing no one
of nothing,  it finds the nearest thing to shade,

allowing the tongue to hang out fat as if to lick
the very air. Which is as dry as masking tape.
Then, like any hostage, it sits down.

Osip Mandelstam’s Memorial Statue in Voronezh

Now that you’re a statue, you can be calm,
Osip, you have made it to the future,
You can raise your giant, muscular hand
To your heart, alleged to be only yourself, your eyes
The size of thank-you notes, the lids
Of their envelopes moist and unfazed.
Now that you are a story, complete with
Irreversible error, at the long unraveling
Of consequences, or the way regrets
Seem to grow and fall from trees in this park
Like Hell’s confetti, you stand here with the rose petals
Some poet, some stupid poet, has strewn at your feet.

David Keplinger is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Another City (Milkweed Editions, 2018), and thee books of literary translation from the German and Danish, including The Art of Topiary (Milkweed Editions 2017), by the German poet Jan Wagner, and House Inspections (BOA, 2011), by Carsten René Nielsen of Denmark. Keplinger has won the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Colorado Book Award, the Cavafy Prize, and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. He teaches at American University in Washington, D.C.