Six Poems
by Sam Kerbel
Evening Red
Do you hear the frogs?
Their buzzing ovaries are your garden
Their song is permission
To hump fruit in clownish suits
That putto poised in stone
Above the president’s grotto
Reminds us how
The old masters bathed
Furious and soapless
Licking tangerines off the trees
Pens and brushes cut
At the stems
Of a paradise
They made themselves
By midnight the baths
Are a weeping mausoleum
Fate hanging from our teeth
Like a cigarette
Loose like a hand
Trying to make a point
A ship, an unfevered dream,
Making waves of filaments
Parsed into pasture
Where cows once grazed
The Bell of Her Bottom Rolls With the Times
A good man keeps the tales of night
Close to his bosom
Where there are no doors
Little cracks in the porcelain doll of night
For stars to rest and revisit
Their long journey into canon
Wisdom absorbs and evaporates
The ripest expression of their fruit
Lush as sunlight on blank paper
As the heron peers at a storm
Winding around a bridge
Where the sounds of union
Quiet less into sigh than distemper
Let gullible spring’s humidity
Wade them from the station
Into green night, to greener dawn
Each night we fast
Palms beside and caved in
Until the poet of night
Sucks in his claws
To let the reds and golds of the room
Brown into themselves
Where the animals no longer crouch
Or corner you with riddles
Yesterday’s milk
Is still wet and wholly white
There is fog and there is day
A dream comes to you like an eel
Flocking migrations
To tour boats
On western piers
Business of Being
You dream of lemons laid naked on the floor,
Oceanic cathedrals with fresh bread radiance,
Idle spring, shadowed and rose-papered,
An excuse to swell in solitude, slow down:
This dream is arable land. Our first covenant
Filled the heavens with the large crests of hills
Sparkling with a groom’s permission,
And spoke psalmically of our days on earth.
Now? Cypress shadows darken the stones
We once used to lay our fruit. So too the news,
Weather-vaned in confusion, of a centuries-long
Rebirth, leavened in quietude, crackling at the base
Of a lady’s tomb. Sunshine floods the marble steps
Rising to the crescent moon, a clock strikes
Out of nowhere, and somewhere someone pleads
In submission, that it shouldn’t be this hard.
I recall a few things: Saturdays without mothers
How much they hardly mattered then,
Pollen storms, fresh custard,
Everything said left unsaid.
Now the barbecue pit
Is black as a deer’s eye, the sea grieves
Shedding salt in steady streams, and now
It looks like it’s about to rain.
I’ve asked you many times without reply,
What do you remember? And what can
You live to forget?
That dark mosaic is an endless riddle
Fashioned from the roots of a manuscript
Left for dead in a drawer.
Even the faces you’ve known all your life
Have a tendency to withdraw
And leave their ballads to love
In a vague bed of praise.
The plains are soft with a painful longing
We wish upon our enemies:
America, what a stranger! and no less
To itself. What strange songs blow.
I’ll lick her ‘til she’s all dried up,
Canyoned into carnival.
I come from a town, just like you,
Where all souls suffer from unknown guilt
And all people know of one another
And dress for themselves,
Where street signs glow in the night,
Where fireflies extinguish themselves in ecstasy
Leaving the stars to write their sermons
To the dwindling dawning day.
The Ballad of Parrish & Kent
It is ethic to stage the high drama.
In this vein, “Mr Parrish
Was proto-technicolor.” Gene Kelly never seemed
So superfluous as five minutes with The Dinky
Bird—where America, for the first and only time
In its history, was a castle in the clouds.
So goes Mr Parrish to the gallery alone
Like a bronze: our hero redoubles in refinement
Those exotic skies, what one might imagine
Balthus would dream of God’s sunset, relies
On some elemental gold. Occasionally names
Are important and to name them is truth
In and of itself a rare thing. Silver seedlets
Whirr aimlessly that god loveth, will take
More than an avalanche to undress her
Those luscious Italian villas: “they
Yanked Maxfield Parrish down for
The latest thing.”
Black waves against a plush tangerine firmament
Pushing up on the blue boughs crowning the savannahs
Into old age, it is a time of summer suede boots
Stomping on a bed of zinnias the path home
By which the younger went the way of his childhood
Home: that crenellated theater
Dedicated “for better living,” white stockings
In a purple dress marching down the back
Stairs of an old house in Brittany, a little late
Night game of hide-and-seek in search
Of a chamber pot (had Kent painted Rozier
This would be something of an awakening
For America)
The maudlin symphony of an orange bikini, lonely
Passage north on a frigate to the stars: America’s
Painter sought Wisdom in her white beneficence
Not in the sands of love littering the long Atlantic
Nor the lovely lighthouse at noon set against
A deep harbor blue (her love wears leather
And a blue striped bathing suit to match): that
Morning Roman chorus sings sweet blessings
To your cats & the lemons & tasty leaves
Drizzling the stones with eastern sentiments
Their absence bespeaks a certain country decor
Of soap holders that stab you in the night
Some way to welcome you to our small hall
Of hell, the blackened heads of autumn cry
From the rubble-soaked glass penniless & buried—
Under whose ghostly cypresses spilled the hillsides
Rockwell Kent countenanced with his brush
Thousands & thousands of times
Cursing tradition, politics of futility, woodworm
Madness beneath our golden palms?
Max went over to Rock & shot him
In the head, not three hours before Marie
Enjoined him, “There is no why there Maxie
Come board our ship of exiles, that autumn
Gold and brown ship trails a sea of dark leader
Interspersed with islands of sense.” A hand reaches
His, colored to its hue, as Mr Maas
Reaches for a drink. The gods have lived too
Long & do not care. “Dr Johnson’s morality was as
English an article as a beefsteak.” And Rockwell
American as a milkshake lay dead the American
Way: cold and pleasant, blood dutifully trickling
Down the capitol steps, that clear blue
Sky vegetates in sparrow grass whose gold canoes
Built these harbors from cursed wood
Beaten by the wet winds birthed at summer’s end,
Spit from the graves of the maimed
Killed & beaten, in spirit, mind, body, soul.
A cat prowls at the foot of the house
Waiting for the senators’ word.
He’s a lantern bearer, he cannot sing, he may
Be demented, he has no voice.
Beechwood
When summer creeps in like an unwanted friend
I dwell among the reptiles, their hanging garden of contempt
Is barbed with scales & scratchy sighs
Smooth enough to tingle even Congress
Up to shine their spurs & set out west
Martyrdom lopes & bends
Without a cloud on the freeway for miles
Or what everyone is doing behind their glass
A young sailor checks his compass first
And sees for the first time the color green
I loathe to be the one to tell
You this but we’ve given up too much
The death wall is laid with concrete
Her cross painted with the veil of the heart’s
White shade, celestial mistletoe dangled
Through spring: hers is the anchor of light
Through a broken bottle, an occasion
For light to shed its mahogany brittle
Slip back into the magical hornbeams
Their garlands of feminine blood
The stiff crystals binding our books
Are a mourner’s tears, her departed’s will
Inscribed on butcher paper. An abiding humidity
Knifes through the last crumbs of goodwill
Saved & stored for winter, when we’d arrive late
To the theater, everyone already there & finely dressed
Beautiful docents gliding gallery
To gallery, and back on the farm the chickens
Refusing to speak, so we passed our evenings
Delighting the dancing moths
Absorbed in film spools laid out white-gloved
On the wood shed counter, wasps circling above.
It would be all too easy to say this was the last
Of paradise. Truth be told we haven’t yet reached
The desert, all we’ve known is wilderness.
Midwest Colonial
It is said
A lost son of Casanova
Probably
Pirouettes in his nameless carriage bound
From Geneva to Winterthur
And sets aside a candied plum
Bitten by Dracula
Two officers tap on the window
Signets bearing the eagle of the moon
An ermine fly grazes by
And here is where they differ
One recalls Mayor Montaigne’s murderous rampage
Through Greater Europe
The sage cuckold had his way with the silverware
A musical grotto
A circumcision
He watched Jews run naked through the streets
He kissed the pope’s hand
Be damned be damned
Another says
And tells the story of an ox
On raids of misadventure
He wanders into a neighbor’s yard
Splits his hoof
Can he still be killed & eaten?
What about a temple flush with cash
When can it be destroyed?
And what of the people’s Kent
Fashioning the Arctic stars?
The answer is the same for both
But will not help
Our sea ripples like a trashbag
Into the grand Venetian harbor
Of the Strip
A cuckoo clock keeps the beat
But the story ends in Reno
With two men fighting in a bathroom
Over claims to misery
No more spirits to summon
They hang like leaves from a great hill
Flush with Potomac heat
Swan-breasted, eye-ringed savior
Weighed on us like nickel
And someone there with a Swiss face
Slings the cuckoo’s song
Of alabaster incarnadine
The morning dew dips its green into your guilt
Coil of light, wrist & cigarette
Long mystery in woman shape
These sighs of appeal may one day scale themselves
Into something resembling dominion
BIO: Sam Kerbel was shortlisted for the 2024 Oxford Poetry Prize. His first chapbook, Can't Beat the Price (2025), is available from Bottlecap Press. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Anthropocene, Apocalypse Confidential, Burningword, Lana Turner, and Libre, among other publications.