Sample Poems by Tim Kahl
Sort and Accumulate
What is the gist of a dark indifference, of a colorless
cloudy day? Can a thought extend beyond the wind through
the heather? I search the bric-a-brac and specimens
at Goodwill for answers, for my answer to
Alvaro de Campos’s tremors of inadequacy.
I resurrect him from the piles of clothes.
Is there anything more useful, more important than
the ability to sort? The socks and bras get tied together,
and they need my labor to separate them, the way I can separate
de Campos from his others — naïve Caeiro offering
the natural egoism of flowers, Reis recalling himself from afar.
I see you, Fernando Pessoa, your hat in a bin mixed with
barbershop quartet records, the harmonies thick but
each part distinct. I see you, Pessoa, dreading
the memories returning to you in these things,
your recollections of the mysterious silence of Lisbon,
your home. My town has a river running through it,
and a man here buys an old typewriter, carries it
under his arm on his bike. Is that you riding over the tracks
and heading south to type out an ode? Whose name does
the river give to you today as it wanders from grip to grip?
You instinctively seem to be rehearsing its form.
I might see you twice, once in a crowd at a charity event,
again, disguised on the sidelines at a soccer match in the park.
Is that you once more, a little boy fishing and listening to
hip-hop? The tide off the coast of Lisbon has swept you up
and suddenly transformed you into an overprescribed American,
struggling to remain true to your failing and singular body.
I should spend some time with you, share a bowl of soup,
and reveal the deeply ingrained flow of personality in you,
you know, the one everyone keeps track of in themselves,
but I have too damn many personalities of my own.
I have unconsciously initiated a pattern that always leads
to the self as obstacle, something prepared for me to
climb over and exercise my heart. I launch myself over
and around the decades past, the decades to come,
the trial balloons rising up and away from me, each with
a different magic-markered face. They rise to mimic the faces
in the clouds on all these colorless days when Americans feel
wounded in the world and are having trouble making
the best of it. Then, they turn to the face of the consumer
and let the massage of the advertiser’s guile begin.
Let the 30-second spots and aisles of discounts replenish
spirits, let the mock-ups at Home Depot serve as
temptations. I wonder why I always see you, Caeiro,
picking out the straightest lumber. There is something
reaffirming in this, right? Don’t answer. I don’t expect
a sensate poet who only sees the world to reveal himself.
Nor can I explain why the classicist Reis who can’t find
steel electrical boxes settles for the PVC plastic.
Only you do I understand, de Campos, who wastes
his life roaming the merchandise to discover something
universal about the human condition. The facts of
existence dictate men are fastened with screwdrivers,
scraps of wire, and duct tape. They wear their ragged clothes
found in the bins at Goodwill forever, with an exaggerated
indifference to the dead and the bored and the extravagant
who wore them beforehand. Whose dark occupation
is it to sort out the names still left on the tags, clinging
to their former owners? Am I the only anthropologist
of American excess? When I find a mirror in the heap,
who will appear there—Reis, de Campos, Pessoa, Caeiro?
Some other lurker in a borrowed wardrobe? I know I should
pass myself off as one who buzzes around and does
a half dozen good deeds before lunch. I might fix a broken
laptop, return it to its genuine state, but that can never happen.
Nothing repaired is ever pristine. Nothing touched up
can hold its face the same. I can photoshop my eyes, ears,
mouth, and nose to look like some vacant searcher.
The elements of me, morphed and pixeled, dispersing
like a talented wind through the heather. I can be run
through the bins, sorted and sampled, until I earn
my degree of other. Why do you ride shotgun with me
again, de Campos? Are we going to Goodwill once more?
Thrown clear by the market’s pressures, we are free
to remake what we find there. All of it might otherwise
seem useless. It inspires a dark indifference. So why do you
keep ghosting me as if there were something else
I should find and keep? All I really need to know
is what I want; then I can be an American.
To Live Enough
The morning sun slaps me with purpose,
and in America that means I should be
competing somewhere. But I am analyzing
the news come from afar and making no progress,
witness to another moral vacuum,
dark clots of desire thickening here and there.
I push myself to ask what’s wrong with
wanting, that little pinprick of the flesh
that keeps everyone moving in the morning,
but in America the word heaps: it means
wanting too much. I ask the empty branch
of the apricot why it should want to live enough.
The mouth of a busy robin answers.
I hurry off to school with my two sons.
A mother tells me she is holding her son
back from starting kindergarten,
another year before he learns
how to do what must be done.
I could tell her that the markets will
punish him, but I don’t want my story
to influence her decision. She hails from
Mexico City, and I let her America soak
into me. Time for analysis later,
when my winnings are
bleached and burned by the sun.
Interpretation of Life in a Fishbowl
My son is born with one testicle.
It is sure to be recognized as a curiosity.
There will be gawkers in showers to contend with
and questions from lovers during bedroom
examinations. That’s life in the fishbowl, as they say.
I stare through the glass during the hospital inspection,
hoping someday I will have something meaningful to
say to him. I have a little one-balled man who is
coming to the surface to feed on the few memories I have
sprinkled there. I remember my dad telling me
in order to be a man I had to learn to be accepting,
because at some point, I would lose something.
I think he said this because he had come through
the Depression. But now losing has another kind of
meaning that confuses me. Sometimes late at night
I wonder about this question: is my son’s scrotum indeed
half-full or half-empty? I keep having a vision that
as the new millennium is ushered in, his absent testicle
will descend like the shimmering sphere that descends on
Times Square — no teeming crowds cheering it on
as it falls. There need not be any public fanfare for this
simple miracle. But for now, there is only this age-old
question of sorting the optimists from the pessimists,
a question that can only be answered in private,
in the presence of a few intimate others who have seen
a person at his best and worst, who can judge
whether a life is either half-empty or half-full
or some other curious floating animal.