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Three Poems Brandon Kreitler

Self-Portrait as the Speech of the Mime It might begin with lips enclosing speech. Not movement, but the possibility of movement withheld. He evokes the direction of circus animals and it doesn’t take. Nor is there gesture for the kissed-off color of the sky, A way to say The knife glints in the crosshairs of stars Like a plot point. The tongue fallow as a field is fallow And in it I as though a hunter In the unfurl of the hunted, The rhetoric of a horse already drowned. To think is to think of oneself But not of I For whom would I speak? Cloture on the Reinstatement of Day The soup is dark. I think of fish hearts floating in the river. The canal we called the river. It was not faith, exactly, that interested you. The din of objects. Silvery, there. Floating. Some negative starlight. An error in category, perhaps. The body that would say as much. The outline of Indiana cloud-cover. For weeks I’d dreamt the dreams of the deposed monarch. The dinner conversation had moved past the context of what you’d waited so long to say. Nothing follows from this. Outside shadows across the gouache-lit valley, implacable whispers. Acts It would seem to have broken               down there. The curtain rended,               the shorn linen                             which depicted               what was then thought to be the whole of history,               but at remove, that is                             as myth. Rended,               the book reads.                             * Its foreignness might strike us                             though we imagine           endlessly               ourselves              as though discrete, filing into               those inner rooms and wandering salt-crusted                                           shorelines soon be peopled, the expectant congregation encircling the place where a speaker might stand.                             And thus the position takes hold.               But witnesses we are not;                             nor even to the more basic acts, some unprecedented gesture toward the broad sky or the mere need to point, to say                                                         this is the actual world;               this will be called the actual world.                                           But it is for us the ease of inheritance, the modeling of the built city and we have only to find ourselves in it.                             * A beginning is sought but it is the beginning of a circle.                                                                               Not capture but caesura.               The afternoon sky puddles into bulbous clouds which too dissipate               to be encountered finally only as remnants of one sort or another, suggesting what they cannot offer—                             The wandering tracts of land               bisected by the routes of burgeoning commerce.               Nothing escapes the exchange of value: the landscape seen as the marbling of the difference                                           from which we might speak our names.                             * The event, we say, occurs. We have chosen this,               the enfolding of history: a barren seabed               and the bodies of fish prove enough to begin its telling.                             * The child refuses to speak without holding the fish in his hands. Even then he refuses to say fish. There is not an ache more basic, like asking for the curtain to be lifted               and feeling only a weight in the mouth and in the distance the fields are burning. Brandon Kreitler is from Arizona and is currently a graduate student at Columbia University. He is working on his first book of poems, some of which have been published or are forthcoming in Boston Review, Diagram, Maggy, Eoagh, and Sonora Review. □