Broken Music: Selected Poems, Revised Edition

By Kit Stokes

The collection includes 93 poems, from four lines to two pages each.
It does not contain this one-line poem, entitled The Prostate's Lament:
"The longest journey starts with a single stop."
The verses and poems can be read in any order. Some are academic, some are nonsense
and some are folk poetry. I have tried to include poems for all readers, including
those who do not ordinarily read poetry.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Apr 12, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543900873

Book preview

music.

Out of Nothing a Something

The music that haunts all broken things—

who is to say just when it began,

that it wasn’t always ours to hear?

Say there was once a boy who found

a ruined piano on a rural scrap heap

and lost himself for a whole summer.

Half-buried in soup cans, gin bottles and chicken-wire,

the strings and iron frame lay flat

like a rusted harp, the case and keyboard

smashed for kindling to heat the basement

house his step-father built for his mother,

the tarpapered floor a makeshift roof

for the dream-house that never got off the ground.

Who could have taught him how to coax

from that shelter of spiders and nesting field-mice

the lost echoes of high art,

to go back in time and rediscover

in pocket-knifed arpeggios

the sound of Mozart’s harpsichord

or, reaching farther still, to strike

from metal on metal the whispering tones

of Bach’s more tremulous clavichord?

If he plucked the strings claw-hammer fashion

and pulled from out of nothing a something,

the technique was driven by formal needs—

self-taught, as love was meant to be.

Suppose that this was how he found that tension

alone could withstand all the elements.

Or suppose he never found a piano,

but only wished or dreamed he had,

as most of us do, when forced to make

our music out of broken things.

The Body Speaks

Last night I watched a deaf poet perform—

the hearing might, at first sight, think of dance

or liken it, perhaps, to air guitar,

such life he drew from castles in the mind

that rabbits leaped from hats he merely sketched.

Yet no waltz ever caressed the knowing mind

as deeply as his echo-less gestures did,

their syntax binding images in space

to thoughts not found in our anthologies,

the music all the sweeter for being unheard.

However strange the world a bloodhound scents,

it pales beside a discourse traced in air,

with every movement made grammatical,

the separate gestures noted rather than seen

(as readers look beyond a stylish font).

The slightest motion scribed against the sky

declaims its corollary to Descartes

for all to see—I sign; therefore I am.

Though swayed by rhythmic speech made palpable,

I could not tell his Hecuba from Adam,

his lost, hanging gardens of Babylon

from Noah’s rainbow arced on Ararat.

Yet at the gasp that his performance drew,

I shared the sudden awe that children feel

when rockets splay across a wordless dark—

and almost understood what Adam felt

when, startled awake, his side an empty ache,

he turned to the strange presence next to him

and spoke at first his wonder with his hands.

Rainbowing

The mallard’s neck dissects in sheen the light,

loosing the stuff of rainbows to excite

in the perceiver signs of sexual

attraction. No less ineffectual

are peacock’s tails. From this we might agree

these birds perceive an abstract purity

that is nor redolent of Ararat—

and all that Noah’s puerile tale begat.

Pollution’s iridescence may be seen

where bilge water bears a film of gasoline

that coils and ripples between the chines. There

a terrible beauty lurks, blending fair

and foul, as thought to contradict those schools

which subjugate the eye to moral rules.

If Newton’s prism ratifies the light,

aesthetics ought to glorify the sight.

Most puzzling to the seer is the light

that falls upon an opened clamshell’s white

and rainbowed nacre—crib and coffin one—

to decorate what never sees the sun.

In this effect without a purpose, who

Would argue that clams perceived what mallards knew?

What impish force compels the world to hide

its light, and strand its rainbows deep inside?

Alzheimer Leases the Professor’s House

A recluse now in the body he inhabits,

a presence between the eyelids and the soul,

he wanders the empty hallways, upstairs and down,

glancing outward as he skirts the picture windows,

pacing among the clutter that gathers dust—

the tennis racquets, chessboards and Spanish guitars.

Philosophies of just and unjust wars,

of marriages, Society, the Good,

of theoretical Homunculi

whose mortal souls resist analysis—

all that hard-won knowledge now lies jumbled

and scattered, the index irretrievably lost.

He hides in the basement closet, a Christian Marxist

shuffling the notes for one last seminar—

The Afterlife: A Prolegomena—

dreaming, perhaps, of that night on a snowbound train,

stalled on the homeward leg of a fitful journey,

when he wiped the fogged-up window impatiently

and saw, as the blizzard paused and the snowflakes settled,

the stars overhead so close he could almost touch them—

the glow of the station platform light-years away.

Two by Two is Noah Count

As sturgeons swell their virgin shell

With caviar eternal,

So fertile loves of turtle doves

Inflate the poet’s journal.

Yet wooing loves of cooing doves

Too much can make lines curdle.

Rhyme other good than motherhood,

Lest all art praise the fertile.

Come, Cherubim, forswear the hymn,

The