Kevin Holden

Winter 2023 | Poetry

Four Poems

Hyaline Plains

 

that would any

I heap in glassy mathematics

shiver into a corner

black and white go, strung over grid

little bowls

you to show any stellation in here

 

please be my

blue redux for aqueduct labeling

you shout dark nibelung

I’d say

happy opaque quartz a shouting

 

all those plains

ever darkling in it

blacken your ore into transfinite huge glyph

bright aleph burning into you

taste that salt

at the starry edge now

 

we weep into happy cubes

feet untethered but aimless,

vectoralist you shower in rosy shadows

poetry is the negative

space of being

in it all folded ligaments shower

vortex for the fistful flowers

 

back in it for you j curve

we are here

saddened in those multiformdances

flow out

in a dress of graphemes naked at the door


 

Stryax

a curve into the backlot a snowdrift

anthracite green partitioned uptaking

or cruciform asphodel in circular sunlight

witness to a crime in that emptylot

chainlinkfence & glinting brokenglass

late at night & a moving frame

hustler or john sideshifting in the shadows

move off that to a forest & recombine

in a vision of different men

lined up from the past, each

under a different tree

& the fountain or reflecting pool or rose garden

isotope of brain & a field a silvergreen sheen

at the circle of the pondcells & blades of grass

aligned & repeating in a cubed or bordered array

dashes & circuitry accumulating in muted gleams

& holding hands they make their way across that waterway

up jaw arrow arch & flowered stone


 

Asterism Talk Talk

it would under since

or that speaks or

within chambers and/or which

for that since

to say

inout curvatures

any archangel

in icy black barn shadowing

tetris or mushroomclouds

you to say blue calx on sheet

icy ivy figure your stone wall

little cubes big big jump

for you that which queering

or life in that

a blueing project, that is, house complex

us to say, hap for us

& ore redux flung for shiny

those birds for shiny also

hug dog azeotrope

aster

a black phlox & beta

& you to say open chamber

happy onyx glyph for shiny

corn or crab he takes that cream

homo apt alt shift razor or cobalt

soup from an ashtray

I mean, shred

o LS, aeolotropic series

vibrant bling up in sparrow arc la

bye bye the encasement

white white, blue blue


 

Nanospace

to get to the place behind the beech tree

that place beyond that greenery

sing foil up into a blaze

ring out sound in a final blue flash

 

deep tones ground into the metal

rose gold aureole

little birds to heave you up to the sky

each second is its own thought

I’ve been to many parts of this city

each section changes so much

or does not change anywhere

marble slab in the mind of God, or air

Kevin Holden is a poet, translator, and essayist. He is the author of seven books and chapbooks of poetry, including Solar, which won the Fence Modern Poets Prize, Birch, which won the Ahsahta Press Award, and Pink Noise, recently out from Nightboat Books. His translation of Jean Daive’s The Figure Outward is forthcoming from Black Square Editions. He is a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows.

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