
Kenneth Pobo’s poems have
appeared in Indiana Review, Mudfish, The Cider Press Review, The
Fiddlehead, and Hawaii Review,
among literary journals. His most recent collection is Placemats,
published by Eastern Point Press. He teaches literature and creative writing
at Widener University in Chester, PA, and in 2007 received the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching. In these poems, Pobo
re-imagines the work of two towering figures in Surrealist painting, Max Ernst
and Leonora Carrington. The couple, who met in London in 1937, lived together in
France until separated by WWII.
You hover above a thin white blanket.
Wind
easily bends the birch nearby
yet it stands—you envy it.
You’re
growing unable to tell human
from animal, your owl eyes,
a hand like a fox paw.
You want
the world to stay still, to stop
that endless turning—
that would mean your death,
everyone’s death. You
say let it spin,
which it does, as if trying to weave
something wonderful.
An elephant feeds a mirage
to a wooden floor.
The entire Industrial Revolution
fits into the beast.
Knock
on its black shell.
It feels nothing.
If you get eaten, you’ll relax
inside the belly.
Headless,
a woman tries to speak the poem
she wrote about loss that she told
to fish swimming overhead,
but they swim away.
An orange
remark, you crave a sunny walk
beyond a blue pergola.
The elephant
remembers a savannah
and a graham-cracker brown river.
This is how it will be—you looking
for blue, the animal looking
for you looking for blue.
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