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    Clues from the Animal Kingdom
    Clues from the Animal Kingdom
    Clues from the Animal Kingdom
    Ebook121 pages40 minutes

    Clues from the Animal Kingdom

    By Christopher Kennedy

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    About this ebook

    In his fifth collection of poems, Christopher Kennedy sifts through the detritus of the past to uncover the memories, images, and symbols that shape an individual’s consciousness. Looking to animals and their instincts for inspiration, drawing shape from the poet’s Irish Catholic working-class roots, these prose poems transcend grief and depression by seeking humanity’s place in the natural world.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBOA Editions Ltd.
    Release dateSep 25, 2018
    ISBN9781942683650
    Clues from the Animal Kingdom
    Author

    Christopher Kennedy

    Christopher Kennedy is the author of Clues from the Animal Kingdom (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2018) Ennui Prophet (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2011), Encouragement for a Man Falling to His Death (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2007), which received the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, Trouble with the Machine (Low Fidelity Press, 2003), and Nietzsche’s Horse (Mitki/Mitki Press, 2001). He is one of the translators of Light and Heavy Things: Selected Poems of Zeeshan Sahil, (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2013), published as part of the Lannan Translation Series. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, Plume, New York Tyrant, Ninth Letter, Wigleaf, The Threepenny Review, Mississippi Review, and McSweeney’s. In 2011, he was awarded an NEA Fellowship for Poetry. He is a professor of English at Syracuse University where he directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing.

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      Book preview

      Clues from the Animal Kingdom - Christopher Kennedy

      I

      CONFUSING MYSELF WITH THE WHIPPOORWILL

      Today, I was a madness of regrettable actions. At the convenience store, I eyed the cashiers warily as they slouched in round-shouldered, teenaged aplomb. Their youth not yet wasted.

      Try not to think was my mantra as I left through the slow, antagonistic electric doors, but the whippoorwills disturbed me with their calls, despite a 93% decline in their numbers in the Empire State.

      And where have they gone? Camouflaged beyond reason so as to be nearly extinct? These questions led me to my own desire to disappear.

      At home, filled with envy, I chopped some vegetables to store for later when the seasons have changed and my plumage has darkened, my face of feathers and slanted light, a veritable mirage.

      WAVES AND PARTICLES

      I wake from a dream of digging my own grave to the sound of my neighbor who has lost both his legs, shoveling his walk, scraping his metal blade across the bricks that lead to his front door. The violet light of early dawn filters through the bathroom window and reflects off the mirror, a wash of waves and particles. A crow glides toward a dead deer’s body on the shoulder of the main highway. Two thousand miles away, a scorpion waits in the sand for a horse to pass, its stinger taut and arched behind its back. I see the black shoe you left behind, fallen to its side. There is no need for life on other planets.

      COAXING THE DOG INSIDE

      A black dog looked in my apartment window. Its eyes were as black as its face. Its face as black as a bible. I stared into its bible-black eyes and saw my reflection. I coaxed the dog toward the window. I opened the door and called the dog, whose name I didn’t know. The dog came to the door. It entered the apartment, fearful, but driven by hunger. I stared at it, hoping to see myself again. I looked at the dog looking at me, and I understood its curiosity was my own.

      I knew the dog was something I’d manifested, something I gave birth to from my skull like a god. Because the dog reminded me of my childhood, I trusted it. The dog shied. I spoke in high, reassuring tones. Here, boy, I said. Here, boy. It cowered and bared its yellow teeth, its liver-spotted gums. I did not understand the white worms coiled in the blood-slick nest of its heart. I reached to pet it. I was surprised how vicious it was.

      AN OLD-FASHIONED COMEDY

      The television strobe divided the room into halves of poverty and grief. We’d put down the dog but not its fleas. They jumped from the olive-green carpet onto our ankles. The old-fashioned comedy shined on us. The fat man was dressed like a robot; the thin man in a vest gestured relentlessly. There was a red telephone next to the couch like the one that calls Russia at the end of the world. When it rang, we refused to answer. The news was never good. How long could this go on? A long time, but quickly. The clock in the kitchen was fast.

      BETWEEN HEAVEN AND HELL

      From here I see the dim lights of the reactor towers and the moon at the end of its tether. A mother and father wave their children in from the water to the beach, where melancholic flies inspect a half-eaten fish, their Dante-circle shrinking as they lower toward the sun-bleached flesh.

      The children dive under, ignoring their parents’ calls, as if they’ve forgotten the names they were given. The parents bolt up from their beach chairs in a mild panic every time the children disappear. I’m forced to watch through the eyes of the animal that brought me here, the animal I’m trapped inside of, confused and untamable, not quite above it all, here, where the timid waves tremble and refuse the shore.

      A BETTER THEATER THAN MY SKULL

      The cloud, dispersing above me, is a dead bird flying back into an egg. Then it’s gone. The moon is a doll’s head melting in a bonfire. There is a moment just before sleep when my body lets go, and I’m as empty as a dead man’s shoes and old enough to be my own father. The night sky’s black flank tattooed with light, the moon comes and goes, its face an indistinguishable horror. I wait for the curtain to rise in a better theater than my skull.

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