The Kafka Poems

#1: I Take Kafka Walking (plus an intro)

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I’ve struggled a bit trying to decide how to present these poems. They’ve presented themselves to me, widely spaced and out of nowhere, over the past ten or twelve years and I kinda like them. 

After the first one came, I had no plan to write another. Regardless of my lack of intent, every couple of years another would arrive out of the ether and dictate its terms of engagement, and I, being the mostly willing servant to my fickle muse that I am, translated and transposed per the instructions given under the label on the jar. I imagine these delivery systems to be something like one of those arcane pneumatic tube message delivery systems one used to see in hospitals and the like. Shclip-shoopshoop-aaaahhhhh.

There are four of these Kafka poems. As I’ve said they’ve arrived widely spaced and are really quite different from one another, outside of the fact that Kafka is the main protagonist, and I am the somewhat ambivalent scribe.

I’ve decided to deliver them to you one at a time and in chronological order according to the sequence of their arrival. I initially thought I would present them all at once, but they are a bit long, even by themselves, and there’s nothing worse than too much poetry all at once except for perhaps not enough poetry... ever. They are more nicely appreciated read aloud, I believe, so give it a whirl… especially if reading poetry is not a particular forte of yours. I will alternate these poems with other writing over the next couple of weeks, just so those of you not predisposed to reading poetry of any kind, EVER, won't feel slighted. Though I have a thing or three to say to you all... later.

And by the way, I can feel another one, another Kafka verse, brewing. I woke this morning with the vestiges of a new one in the series flopping around in the bottom of the boat like a trout or a largemouth bass. I threw it back. It needs to grow a bit. But it will come. You'll see it here, I betcha.

Oh… and another thing. It seems important for me to restate that my objective in sending this stuff to you all, oh ye faithful reader, is not to insist that you read everything that lands in your email box in the order of its arrival as soon as it arrives. How tedious. I mostly want to gather the writings in a single place where people who enjoy them can pick through them at their leisure, something like a few hours spent at an old record and CD store. 

There are no requirements here. I expect that you, if you are anything like me, have lives with demands that take up a fair amount of time beyond what reading arrives in your computer, as well as much, much more reading material waiting for you that you can barely get to even when, in the best of all possible worlds, it lies so seductively, juicily, in repose over there, or stacked and leaned, begging you to consume. 

And isn’t that what life is all about? Consumption? Just ask Kafka.



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I Take Kafka Walking 


Against my better judgment
I take Kafka on my walk along the cliffs
but he turns out to be an energetic hiker
with an eye for the unusual.
He fits right in with ferns
and Indian pipe.

*

First, he is enthralled
by the mats of deermoss.
No seed, no root,
they cover the sandy pine barrens
on our way to the high
stony shore.

*

He lies down to take hundreds of pictures.
I tell him about bears and he says
“something always eats something.
The deer moss reminds me of home
because it is so silver
and confused.”

*

“The beech trees are falling!
The beech trees are falling!”
Kafka is in a panic. One huge specimen
leans over the path like doom
but its tangle in the crown of an old maple
keeps it from finalizing the fall.

*

The woods is littered 
with these great trunks.
“The beech trees are falling
someone must do something”
but Kafka is familiar enough
with a lack of anything being done.

*

Kafka sees a collection of fat people
wading at the base of a rock
called chapel rock.
This has always been a beautiful lonely place.
Now a half-naked woman shaves 
and a man soaps up his disappearing genitals


*

crouching in the ponds
at the base of that rock
from which a single tree has always grown.
There are not enough rangers
to stop these ablutions.
Kafka is confused.

* 

Kafka is stoic.
A lovely but chubby young man
sprawled over the deck of a boat
on this calm day
brings up a loud mouthful of blood and spits 
in the clarion water.

*

Kafka sees the storm move in.
He is unafraid
having faced so many blunt winds
and been lost so many times.
Little rivers, rivulets really,
become raging falls.

*

A great blue heron
makes his loud “whank”
as it flies over Kafka’s mossy bed.
All beauties fail and wither.
He sleeps.
The storm abates

*

rumbles over the big lake for hours
before the moon
forces light on his pale brow.
There will be no dreams
in this sleep.
“The trees are dying.” he says


*

then he is gone. Now
Kafka is part of a crescent moon.
The cliffs are alive and move
in procession over sweet waters
where manitous rise up
and spill the big canoes


*

and all the constellations
drive the sky ‘til morning.
Kafka waited for this
in his dark suit. The bed of deer moss
grew into his palms and eyes.
I could not stop it.

*

All the walking made the old rifts
active again.
What a language they sing!
Kafka is king in this country
as alien as his cemetery
and the maze of Prague is

*

to hardened layers of silt and animal shells
gone mighty and severe 
against the sky.
I sleep through the storm
but still struggle
with weak reasons to stay alive

*

without the trees
in the numbness of the constant tides
of war and reason and the short
short bursts of love.
Give me blood in the hand.
Give me loons in little fern lakes.

*

Give me kings who count for nothing.
I have included Kafka in this trek
and he has become my opposite
and my replicate. Oh,
let the beeches die,
whole countries of canopies of them

*

out to this long stretch of colored cliffs 
changing in the sun and storm,
traveling over the waters’ eons 
and under the constant moon
before the rains come
after the rains conclude.


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