Welcome to “Poetry at The Arts Fuse.” A new poem, every Thursday.
 

The Celan Variations
 
 

_______________________
 

my disclosure —

let me say what I’ve known

grief interlude, no perception

not rent,

those “poor” who propose

in mapping

a different world to walk thru

by way of our own

imagelife, theirs

& all colors

& thornmilk

& bereft’s blue voice
 

_______________________
 

in the myth of the treatise

of the new year

sun, constant lever at my door

fragile markers, puzzle boxes

sheets pulled tight
 

_______________________
 

“You Don’t Know What Love Is”

I’m only happy

when Coltrane’s playing

dishwasher on, midday light

kids at play on a fort in the front room

deciduous probing orb

what bounces over

& through & into you

as we care for one another

the “Market” slides
 

_______________________
 

Lorca’s mouth —

beautiful above the “Lettered City”

I see love in you

grass mirth anonymous sky

vapor in the hearth

of the artist’s

home, my bedside books

made of stone

& sweet indulgence

light thru burrowed

space of spine

which receives needle

& thread

then closes, path

on every shore

plays in the sheen

skinned-animals brightened

by sun
 

_______________________
 

cataclysm’s pretty weave comes

as flux & passionate detail

horn halogown thinthimble

of life

Orphic waters widen

where the current gifts bridges,

hours of worship

of locus

countenance & color

soft incarnations

thoroughdeep & place of cleft

beauties not-yet-born

parable & discourse,

meridianchild of emptiness

& innerhouse

brittle, beyondworld

of verse
 

Keith Jones is the author of Echo’s Errand (Black Ocean) and the poetry chapbooks, blue lake of tensile fire (Projective Industries), shorn ellipses (Morning House), the lucid upward ladder (Verse), Fugue Meadow (Ricochet Editions), and Surface to Air, Residuals of Basquiat (Pressed Wafer). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Barrow Street, Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, Flag + Void, Harvard Review, Transition, and elsewhere. He teaches in the Africana Studies Department at the University of Massachusetts, Boston and is the current Poet-in-Residence at the New England Conservatory.

Note: Hey poets! We seek submissions of excellent poetry from across the length and breadth of contemporary poetics. See submission guidelines here. The arbiter of the feature is the magazine’s poetry editor, John Mulrooney.

— Arts Fuse editor Bill Marx