NEW! Two poems by Aby Kaupang

Aby Kaupang

TWO POEMS


one birdhouse per truncation
groves the lawn and alpenglow
a soldier vanishes the aviary
what a beautiful bird-circus
the family encrusts on marble



WITHIN THE SLAUGHTERING SHED

Now unpurposed, lofty, dim and elm, it’s pocked by decades of December’s hail. Fever pigeons blush beneath its crumpled hour. Enough or all their coo cannot submerge the splintering rafters’ dusty places, reliquary traces forming spaces. I can’t exact a suitable payment from my palm.

I’d anticipated winter here but winter here recalled itself and longed for five long years. To advance then now from loss and quiet and reverence of cost? I do not wonder at the elegance of lack. There is no expenditure of anger, the motion of ferocity and fear, when it is free in the slaughter shed. When it is shredded in the beaming where the cooing wings nest.

Notes of dusted light make pilgrimages from choired rafters through the dimness, the ploughing shears, the cardboard barrels of feed and mice that are and are not inside themselves. And I am knotted in the beams and a bloom is on the floor. Christliness

perpetual empties to the earthy floor--not formed of dirt or clay or hardened irrigants of ditch and field but something finer, deep and silky--perpetual. Light hazes pallid on errancy, descends beneath the swaying creak of wrought pulleys, wheelbarrows, rat burrows. And light

cracks in from where branches slog in March, where winter melts to gift in slanted afternoon, to here where air is choir and choirs disparate--a dirge, a hymn, a requiem, natival, excommunicatio--pigeons knotted in the blush.