David Keplinger
David Keplinger Poems
Along the fringe of two known worlds
That make the field, the prison yard,
Behind the house my mother and her sisters
...
Above the cellars
Lined with preserves,
In a foreign year,
Its calendar girls
...
He didn't want the EKG. He didn't want
To know. But the nurse attached
Its greasy patches to his chest to read.
...
Like an enormous leech the pancreas lies
with its head tucked into the duodenum,
upside down, the tail outstretched over it,
...
When the time comes I will lie
to you‚ pajamaed family‚
about the waitress who has scrubbed
...
Take Messina: you'd be impressed and even sad
that I remember. The crag of mottled faces
the rocks made like old pensioners in back pages
...
In Florence‚ Colorado‚ the prisoners
sit glum‚ like superheroes stripped
of their utility belts: no pens permitted
in one's cell. Night‚ the gates soar open;
...
Lincoln, leaving Springfield, 1861,
boards a train with a salute: but it is weak.
To correct it, he slides his hand away
...
They're not in my way. They let me be.
They say that nothing can happen to me.
How good.
...
David Keplinger Biography
David Keplinger is the author of three books: The Prayers of Others (2006), winner of the 2007 Colorado Book Award, and The Clearing (2005), both from New Issues Poetry & Prose, as well as The Rose Inside: Poems (Truman State University Press, 1999), chosen by Mary Oliver for the T.S. Eliot Prize of that press. He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. He is also the author of World Cut with Crooked Scissors (New Issues, 2007), which he co-translated with Danish poet Carsten Rene Nielsen. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Ploughshares, Florida Review, AGNI, Nimrod, and Minnesota Review. He currently teaches at American University in Washington, D.C.)
The Best Poem Of David Keplinger
Elegy For The Precious Time Before Dinner
Along the fringe of two known worlds
That make the field, the prison yard,
Behind the house my mother and her sisters
Live in, this was years ago.
We're all still there, itinerant
As wind, the straits of corn
And guards who pace their impossible promontories,
And the small mouse just born here,
Total as a thumb.
With her sisters who are dead and my mother is a beauty
Taking the spoon
To beat the dog back from the pot,
At which they all begin to laugh.
Little beetles with a kind of Viking armor
I want to smash you, smash the spiders
Atop their pagodas
Which are the same as thoughts,
Smash the crazy locust that won't abandon its post.
At the house the women happily
Eye up the sauce about to boil.
I am wearing my emblematic cape.
I can fly at any moment if I want to,
But I don't.
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