KENNETH P. GURNEY

The Poetry Of..
Kenneth P. Gurney..................................

ADD THE BIT ABOUT THE WALLS FALLING

Some nights I make a killer
pot of coffee, serve Fat Witch brownies
and play jazz on the old turntable.

Sometimes, I dance all night
to the cicadas, the popper toads,
the crickets.

It is the same on my walk through the park
where the kids play, create the clamor
of voices and actions that echo God's first utterance.

There is that place I hike to on the mountain,
sun and shade, rock and water,
where the butterflies land on my motionless body.

Really, this poem is about that search
to find that music that resides
in the back of the mind:

that harmony sacred texts subscribe to,
that feeling of oneness
where the vibration of the subatomic

creates a binding hum,
a whitish glow that blots outv our differences, yet leaves

our unique signature, resonance, alone
and in the attached company of everything.

FASHION

In the afternoon, in my bed,
Delphi flips through magazine advertisements:
Versace, Armani, Yves Saint Laurent—
names implying something special,
a touch of elegance, old Europe,
white establishment anorexia.

Delphi draws mustaches on the women
with a black felt pen, fills in their eyebrows
to more resemble Frida, laughs out loud:
corporate advertising plain Jane
equals glasses on the runway waif.
Then Delphi circles nipples embossing
silk, satin, cashmere.

Delphi, who reads the stars, the tarot,
looks at the pictures, the words:
tiny black abstracts in neat rows.
She ponders their form, significance,
wonders how beauty can mean the same
in ten point Times-Roman
as it does in twelve point Helvetica.

She arrives at the back cover: a girl,
face blurred by a sheer fabric, her body
naked, breasts round, firm, nipples covered
by a black and white logo ribbon, a pink
perfume grenade in her hand—

I tell her the word at the top
of the explosive spray of rose fabric
shooting off the crown of the girl's head
says flowerbomb.

Ah. Delphi says, No idenity, brains blown
out of her skull, just the bloom of her youth
scattered on the ground for a procession
of well monied men to walk on.

SLIPPING AWAY

I'd like to show you the red
of a burn on my arm,
but it turned an age old white
with its heat long dissipated.

It evokes a teen story,
a church in middle America,
a pizza fallen to the floor
fresh from the oven.

But my story fails to phase you,
as you change poses again
in your continued attempts
to find the perfect stance

where the soul balances
and the mind's fire burns away
the madness that denies
the linear nature of time.

And though you heard nothing
I said about myself, you claim
my hand and lead me deep
into the rows of corn

where simple love bursts
into passion upon the ground
though May Day is three weeks past
and contrails web the sky.

A sense of once-upon-a-time
fills this field and leads us up a slope
to the yard of a small white house
with a picket fence

and there a dream of dogs and children
takes your eyes to a different world
where, as a woman in an apron,
you pin clothes to a line

until the church bell across the valley
calls you back and the honey light of day
gives way to the setting colors
across the west.

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