Philip Kobylarz
Skiffs Moored
Man in coat, horse pulling cart in the field beyond the fields.
Stone wall surrounds the cemetery where the medieval buried
the village’s former citizens. Their bones line the walls
at the vinery in the abbot’s hollow where mistletoe
and wolfsbane grow. Back then it was different.
When things made sense. In the cave of Saint Victor’s church
where they say mussels grow, there is a black box
and inside it lies a relic. Inside the relic is a pool of dust.
And dust is sacred. The horned owl threads the forest
for its bounty of mice and the fine machinery of insects.
In the long white drifts of winter, leaves disappear under
mounds of snow and skiffs moor on the beach like dried shoes
sent to shore by riptides. Their crosses of mast lean crooked.
Harvest’s being harvested past the mountains and high plains
beyond.
The night paints the city’s hues in the lights of cars, the streets
in rain, lamplight and halogen. A picture of a picture hangs
in the picture on a wall at an eatery. A mistral blows
throughout morning, the alleys filled with motionless cars.
The clock tower has no face because it is no longer needed.
Foxglove decorates the speckled arid ridges. Summer ends
in an abundance of vegetables. And gunshots.
Philip Kobylarz
Incense or Varnish
It is not something you can sense.
Not like the stillness behind an elevator’s
closed doors. Not like the moment in which
you remember a key is lost, or realize that you
have smoked a Camel and are in a crowd.
Or the thought spoken in a yawn, a punctured shroud of air,
a glass eyeball, dates circled on a calendar,
the urn in which a relative is kept
left open—
when the young couple, just married,
left the motel there was a scent of burning cloth
and a flurry of luna moths around the room,
father said at a visitation. It seems the bride and groom
were virgins, and in a fit of terror, in the darkness—
they ruined her wedding dress. Afterwards he searched
for a pack of cigarettes. He only found matches.
When they realized what had happened, they laughed
and later cried. He decided to burn it on a hanger
hung from a defunct telephone wire.
A ghost on fire in the First Act of love.
Their honeymoon in cinders.
Fake bells chime in a clock,
their shapes are heard but not seen.
The shells of locusts left to dance in the wind.
A bottle filled with broken glass, a trace of lipstick
around its rim. A wisp of parsley in the rain.
A crescendo of footsteps through the fog
on the lock and dam. It is either like these or not
when he is dressing the patients, as he says,
precise to the hidden details, he matches their ties
with their socks. He cleans their teeth with Q-tips.
There once was a woman who swallowed a spider.
There was a man who lost his hands carrying
window glass when a sheath of it broke loose
like an old bifocal. He tried to catch it—
a gut reaction. Then there was the coffin
of the eight year old protege
itself shaped like a violin. There is that photo
of a doctor who had spontaneously combust
yet nothing around him was burnt,
his slipper still fitting on his foot.
Flies birth out of rotting meat. The elevator stops
at the thirteenth floor. Snakes discard their skins
like silk shirts on a summer day. The crickets
with a lost leg strum the more resonate songs.
They have more to say than newspapers
still rubber-banded. Near the abandoned
railroad car that moves inches on the tracks
towards the gully with every storm,
there is a piano in a church all alone.
