Kathy Walker

The Lightning and the Ground

You smile at me
but I am not benevolent.
I am a lion or a snake --

People are good until
their compelled actions
make the mettle

In rock you get
one chance
at the sculpture

The waste of a
quick blast
is vain and moral

I am a hairy woman
I am outrageous and
decomposing, serious

enough to suffer
my chances
I've said

something here and
I don't
blame myself

or anyone. This is
an approximation.

See, I
pick pick pick
at this now.

 

Walking with Kim in the Labyrinth

We walk past the discrete fuzziness of
little baby geese. I stop to take a picture
with my digital camera. I tell Kim
I'm working on a Definition
of God. Puzzles, fjords, little sticky bits.

She tells me about a mudslide near
Chagrin. How houses aren't safe forever,
especially ones on the edge of anything.
But she says sometimes you want
to be on the edge, the only house in
all this wildlife and stuff. I tell her
once I wrote a poem, how somewhere
in the world, whole houses fall under
angry mudslides in an entire sweeping act.

Sometimes the words are wrong,
I am now a specialist in naming things. It is possible
there is no love, just absorption.

What we see is the system of things, not the
little touching parts. There are Rosetta Stones
in fingerprints and feelings are Rorshach tests.
The sinister truth is that efficient people are
self-interested. God is just a category.

Nighttown

1.

Opened with curly cues and
punctuation marks, the
mystery of steps, staircases,
an Escher drawing in sound,
conclusions upon compounded
conclusions -- no -- wait --
considerations --

I have vibraphone feet. All
the paths will be percussed.

2.

As fast as we can think it,
it will be done. I believe
we are all geniuses.
The fellow with the black
frame glasses is sincere.
Cigar smoking is a virtue.
The man on bass is a
good person.

3.

Bass-twanged contradiction,
counterpoint. Wood is a horn,
a tuba in his finger throat.
A piano is a harp. A theme
is a commercial, an angel,
an elevator.

I'm shaking my head yes,
the piano man shakes his
head no, no, no.

4.

The vibraphone feeds the
back of my head. We are in
Salvador Dali's floating head,
metal birds, rotating ornaments.
The ding-dong cathedral.
The mirror behind the band
is in technicolor, and the bassist
holds his wood in a blue suit
and mustard scarf. The yellow
lights like gas lights. The room of
oak and mirror. The afterwork
intellectual audience. There is
exactly the sum of one young girl
in the audience with a sexy shirt.

5.

A song in bass, the last explanation.
Muted digital distortion and exaction.

6.

Calibration. Slow eyelids,
finger fall. Pressing.

We're gonna press the air --
clasp this music --

This is a sonorous sheet,
diffraction into suffuse static,
into my drink.

7.

This is the only thing that makes sense to me.
The piano man grimaces.

8.

Drum solo: I wait for the drums to combust.

Katie Daley's feet