And now into the viscous dark -
that blacker than imaginable heart
of things - I go to undergo new throes

of recollection - transformation. My
mother loved carnations - their peculiar
sweet timidity - I remember their

strange scent and hold on her and
on the hollow casket (she was nowhere
to be found in it) where they bestowed

their blushing and their bloom: riding
off the sides, they filled the room
with dissonance and odd perfume.

Three years ago, approximately
today, she started sliding on
the way to die the first week in July.

And now against the viscous dark -
that blacker than imaginable heart
of my unknowing - I imagine pink arising -

growing: redolently weird - its power
blasts the past and future into now –
enigmatic blossom of eternity: her flower.

.

.

Guy Kettelhack

Guy Kettelhack has authored, co-authored, or contributed to more than 30 nonfiction books. His poetry has been featured in Outstretch, Van Gogh’s Ear, Melic Review, New Pleiades, Malleable Jangle, WORM 33, Triplopia, David Taub e-motion, Poetry Life & Times, Poetry in Emotion, Das Alchymist Poetry Review, the PK list, The Rose & Thorn, Heretics and Half-Lives, Desert Moon Review, Hiss Quarterly, Danjerasu, Autumn Sky Poetry, and Words-Myth. Two of his poems placed in the InterBoard Poetry Community competitions in 2004. His poem “Alter Ego” was selected as a quarterfinalist in the Lyric Recovery competition in March 2004, and he won the Margaret Reid Poetry Prize for Traditional Verse in November 2004. Twenty of his poems appear in the New Pleiades Anthology of 2005. Book 1 and 2 of “Soho Poems & Drawings About Drawings” (in collaboration with Norman Shapiro) can be found at ufemisms.com. He lives in New York City.

.

© 2006 Guy Kettelhack