Virginia Konchan

Afterimage

Past the dive bar. Past the night clubs.

Past the cobblestone, piss-soaked streets.

Past the smokestack, windmill, Boeing jet.

Past the oxygenated arboretum, the train

and its steel tracks hauling cargo, freight.

Past paranoia, scopophilia: past avalanche,

the cavalcade, the sweet honeysuckle vines.

Past the time-lapse photo of a falling star,

new embryo, a germinating cosmos seed:

past the soul’s habits, attitudes, postures,

living testament to the weight of history.

Past where language ends and god begins.

What is wealth but adding zeroes to a sum?

Past eyeballing the latest wares and gadgets

brokering satisfied contentment, for a spell:

beyond bliss of surfeit, elemental reverie. 

Past the production of knowledgeability

to the dim corridor of communicability.

Past the hem of Christ’s robe, to the idea

of infinity. Past dataism, quantification,

disembodied cerebration, to celebration.

Past the serrated edge of angelic wings.

Past wherever you happen to suddenly

be, entangled like a caterwauling cat

in the late twilight of the humanities,

to an open field studded with violets

declaring grief and joy contrapuntal.

Past recitation, scrambling for keys.

After metaphors of light, comes light—

human life the fault line, vindication

of what it means to breath, to breathe.  

Intercession 

The past is always arriving.

The future is so seldom here.

And the present, a perfect storm,

thrashes madly but won’t appear.

What I want recedes on a wave

that is not a wave, only water.

What I want is the inverse of

what everyone else seems to want:

to get what they think they deserve.

Take poetry: you have to be rich,

in some sense, to write a poem,

in the sense that you have time

to luxuriate in hypotheticals.

I don’t have time: I steal it

from the overlord of labor,

pleasure’s puppet master.

I make a loud commotion

then disappear when he

is assessing the damage

to his surf & turf dinner,

his gold-encrusted valise.

How much grief is too

much: is there a surfeit,

a cap that engenders no?

Make me like the moon.

She never begs, even before

being beheaded without trial.

Make me like the sun, who

cannot be thwarted in any

true cosmological sense.

No one wants the real you?

No one wants the real me, either.

No one wants the real anyone:

Lord, have mercy on us all.

Libretto


I once read that the water molecules in a bottle

onto which is written the word grief will vibrate

differently then the water in a bottle marked joy.

How are we doing? I read on the back of a truck

as it barreled ahead of me on a pockmarked road,

along with a 1-800 number to phone in a response.

Not well, my friend, though I could be projecting.

I had a client for whom I worked for six months:

when I sent him an invoice for 450 hours of labor,

including editing, correspondence, and research,

at a rate below minimum wage, he refused to pay.

“I only pay for deliverables,” he said, “not time.”

We had an oral agreement, I ventured: too bad.

In my youth, I read that an evangelical church

raised money to forgive the personal debt of

members of the flock and community in need.

That’s nice, the way clearly marked signage

is when you’re driving through a hurricane.

Weather, flora, and animals respond to their

environments and the cues of their makers:

instincts and senses not eroded by thought.

A good essay, a teacher told me, leads the

reader through its argument by the hand.

Take no care for your possessions, safety,

or existence, I read in the New Testament:

I’m relieved, as my only desire is to die.

I closed the book and walked to the lake

to watch a sunset, alone with my shadow.

I didn’t have a camera, but it didn’t matter.

A camera could never capture that, only an eye.

Childlessness

I lie horizontal and think about the rain,

how the garden has not yet been seeded.

Above me, a cloud passes, an ambient

drone, joining others in a conflagration

of whatever my mind imagines them

to be: a Velociraptor, brain aneurism,

Jehovah on his throne. I have no need

to see myself replicated or reproduced,

however, let alone genetically spliced

with a man who will break my heart:

have no desire for a form of laboring

that would split me open like an atom,

nor to raise a small human who learns

how to exist by neuronally mirroring

my ways of existing, from behavior

to the inflections and pitch of voice. 

Creation and self-forgetting cannot

coexist when you bring a child or

children into the world, because

now your name is father, mother:

species survival depends on this

willingness to remain one thing.

Yet to be any form, what is that?

Proteus, the god of shapeshifting,

can foretell the future but changes

his shape to avoid said prophecies:

answering solely to those capable

of capturing and holding him while

he morphs between a lion, serpent,

leopard, water, tree. I don’t know.

I think change is hard, personally.

I’m not selfish: I’m impoverished.

Therefore, my lifework will be me.

Optimism 

Is that a house, or an AI-generated image?

Is that a face, or a high-resolution dream?

Father, agent of my solitude, deliver me

from this silent passion play, wherein I’m

typecast as a grieving witness in the crowd.

Pain made me conscious of my need of you,

as if I had to know dependency to praise you.

I was empty, then: filled with the words and

ideas of others, vulnerable to hungry wolves.

I was the world’s plaything, eager to please,

to echo and anticipate the desires of others,

that in exceeding them I might be fulfilled.

Instead of rewriting my story, you erased

my story—husband, lover, stranger, god—

subtle distinctions feel meaningless now,

my body a sunken depression in the grass.

Sweaty palms, palpitating heart, cognitive distortions:

what on earth has ever been accomplished by desire?

The songs feel alien: the unspeakable entered them.

There is a hole in the ozone. I do not own my name.

A god falls in love with a mortal: both live forever.

A mortal falls in love with a mortal: after the spell

follows misery, decrepitude, the end of the flame.

I didn’t write this bummer opera: it wrote itself,

fatalism styled as choose your own adventure.

I’m dead now, nothing hurts. I ask you what

every soul in purgatory asks: will I be raised?