This Week's Poem

The Poem Tells Us Death
To Gottfried Benn

The poem tells us
death’s geometry
is not round like earth,
supple and cold like endless sea,
but plotted upon contiguous
right angles, drained of abstraction
into sharp corners and red alleys,
a razed mountain
and human rubble,
all organs and cavities and words,
a pure mathematics.

An expression of love
in copper transit,
itself labored over like a poem,
his many graveyards
know no shadow or ghost.
Where is the vacuous depression
expected of darkness
and the vicious emotion
bound to its description?
His world writes
between wintry doctor’s hands.

Silence the symphony!
the poem tells us,
and weave a landscape
of precise incisions
and dull spoons,
of colorless blood
and knives like flowers
thrown amongst the summer-faced children.

Carve the dawn in language
and translate it unevenly
so both living and dead
can read the same day

and ending us in twilight,
mince me, this demanding poem,
and drink me like sand
in your ripening garden.

-published by Ken*again