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.