Kim Roberts
THE FLOOR IS STICKY
Robert is on a mission:
he wants to learn how to say the floor
is sticky in every language,
or rather, every language in which its countrymen
(its women) drink beer in bars.
He thinks it's a good ice-breaker.
He's just learned it in Dutch, and now
I can't get it out of my head:
de vloer plakt, de vloer plakt.I love the way other languages feel
in the back of my throat, the parts of the mouth
the English doesn't use.
When I was a kid, I used to speak
a gibberish that I thought sounded
convincingly foreign.
I would bicycle to the beach where I could speak it
into the wind loudly without embarrassment.
I thought if I could only live somewhere elseI could leave the me of me behind,
take only the shell of my body
and fill it with someone new.
That's how desperate I was.
I only know a few phrases in French:
I can say I am tired,
You are my little cabbage,
Do you want to go to bed with me tonight?
There's been a terrible accident.
HOW TO IMAGINE DEAFNESS
Darken your ears until the tunnels
with their intricate clockwork
are sheathed in pitchy calm.
Hum a little blue, to yourself,but keep it secret. The small bones
will dip delicately, like willow leaves
that merely brush the water's surface,
in their repose. The small hairswill lie down together like tentacles.
Listen: the lake stops its lapping
repeptition of sibilance
(physicist, Sisyphus, sassafras)and the great snail unfurls itself,
stretches its tongue longingly
toward the distant echo surge
that must be the heart.
BOY MEETS GIRL
Of all the elements on the Periodic Table,
my favorite is Molybdenum, because I love
to clack its consonants against my teeth.
It's used somehow in the production
of steel, which makes me think of Andrew Carnegie,
which makes me think of big-bellied men in suits.
When the railroad tracks met at Promontory Point, Utah,
that was a kind of love story,
if by love you mean the place where you take over
where I left off.
SIAMESE TWINS
Chang and Eng shared a liver.
................................................For eight years, they toured America and England
performing acrobatics (although denied entry to France: officials feared their malady
would spread to pregnant women).
......................................................In America, they always appeared with the
image of an eagle and the motto, Union and Liberty, one and inseparable, now and
forever. Like two states in a united nation. Like their home state, North Carolina,where they retired at 28, became farmers, married sisters, and between them sired 21
children.
..............Emerson once wrote that life cannot be divided or doubled. Any invasion of
its unity would be chaos. The soul is not twin born, but the only begotten...
......................................................................................................................I wonder
how they taught themselves that delicate dance: when to fuse, when to be separate,
how to make their own privacy.
..................................................The newspapers wrote that Eng died of fright,
waking next to his dead brother in the dark. But really Chang died from a cerebral
clot, and when blood pooled in his body, Eng bled to death.
..............................................................................................The body is a mysterious
housing: it brings us pleasure, fails us daily, encloses a fragile sense of self. And
when we die, our other half goes too.
FOWLER AND WELLS' PHRENOLOGICAL CABINET
Walt Whitman made regular visits.
.......He loved to touch the white porcelain head,
marked off in sections: Appetite, Grief,
Acquisitiveness. Like a butcher's chartmapping the choicest meats.
.......Whitman knew the body's limits,
and how the mind, a grid
of memory and fear, narrows the rangeeven further. He hated limits,
.......prudence, high manners,
but he loved a good system
and wanted to learn this one'ssteady answers. Why wouldn't
.......what's inside show up on the skin?
The bumps of the head,
small ones like hiccups,large ones that span three or four
.......categories, elongated heads, ones
that come to a point. His categories
would need new names:Voluptuousness wears an open collar,
.......Indolence takes the shape
of a cardboard butterfly perched
on his finger. Adhesiveness wants a walkon the dark docks, a ferry ride across the river.
.......And Sublimity roars like a leaf.
His home in Camden,
where I touched his rubber galoshes,once overflowed with stacks of paper,
.......a chaos, a fire hazard.
He wouldn't let the hired woman touch it.
Whitman claimed an internal logiceven to Disorder; he loved
.......a good system. In the prison
across the street from his house, men line the windows.
Women on the sidewalk dance, arms above their heads,hold a pose like Cleopatra, then change.
.......I thought at first: performance art?
Then realized they were spelling
with their bodies, forming the vowelsand the consonants in the air.
.......The body's news comes slowly.
Whitman knew about longing,
he nursed dying Civil War soldiers,knew the stink of rotting flesh,
.......of pus staining a bandage yellow,
the angel face we wear when we're asleep.
He was large in Sympathy.He knew something of fate
.......and its strange journey through the grey
thickets of Infelicity and Melancholia,
the temperaments that form in the womb.
Kim Roberts is the editor of Beltway Poetry Quarterly. The author of two books of poetry, The Kimnama (Vrzhu Press) and The Wishbone Galaxy (WWPH), individual poems of hers are also included in numerous print anthologies, such as American Poetry: The Next Generation (Carnegie Mellon University Press), Cabin Fever (The Word Works, Inc.), Hungry As We Are (Washington Writers Publishing House), Poetic Voices Without Borders (Gival Press) and The First Yes: Poems About Communicating (Dryad Press), as well as CDs such as 31 Arlington Poets (Paycock Press) and Poetry Alive at Iota (Minimus Productions). She has published widely in literary journals throughout the US, as well as in Canada, Ireland, France, and Brazil.
.......Roberts is the author of six plays, three of which have had full productions, one a staged reading at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and two of which were published in 2006 in Ghoti Magazine. In addition, poems of hers have been set to music by an alternative rock band, Arc of Ones, and by classical composer Daron Hagen, and several have been choreographed by Jane Franklin Dance Company.
.......Roberts has been the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the DC Commission for the Arts, and the Humanities Council of Washington, DC. She has been a writer-in-residence at eleven artist colonies: The Kimmel-Harding-Nelson Center for the Arts, Hidden River Arts, The Artists' Enclave at I-Park, New York Mills Arts Retreat, The Millay Colony for the Arts, The Mesa Refuge, Ragdale Foundation, Ucross Foundation, Blue Mountain Center, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
See Kim Roberts's web site:
http://www.kimroberts.org