L’Ancien
by
B. Childs-Helton
I
bring to bear whatever I can find –
old
potsherds, empty casings
from
some long-fought war
in
secret latitudes
outside
the official theater
of
sanctioned shadows
on
the ancient walls
where
the painted prey
brought
down perpetually
is
signed with a red hand
long
disappeared,
magic
sown with salt
where
the land is silent
but
the rocks are resonating underneath
the
insouciant sun
that
greens a disguise of grass
and
hides in the wheel of ghosts
in
some other sky.
My
voice is smoke
because
I have turned to sparks
and
incidental ashes like the rest,
unable
to remember what to say
but
singing anyway in borrowed light.
Telepathy
by B. Childs-Helton
by B. Childs-Helton
If
I were reading someone’s mind
right
now (assuming
that
a mind is like a book,
enough
that its usual job
is
to sit unread), the leery owner
might
pretend real hard
that
whatever page I’m reading
is
either blank or trivial enough
that
nothing beautiful is visible
above
its impregnable anonymity;
that
poetry is fancy tricks with words
that
fill the dutiful blankness
with
odd thoughts,
dangerous
suspicions that those words
might
not mean exactly what they say
&
suddenly turn from a pile of normal bricks
into
an expanding cloud of doves,
&
there goes the wall that I was trying to build
to
keep hope out & imagination in
(disguised
as plans I must pretend are dreams),
&
suddenly I’m enjoying what can’t exist,
invited
to just make up stuff like mad.
Good
thing telepathy is a parlor trick.
B. Childs-Helton has
been tangled up in language lifelong—immersing in literature,
creative writing, songwriting, and folklore studies at and around
Wittenberg University and Indiana University. He served on the poetry
editorial board of Indiana Writes (now Indiana Review), performed in
Bloomington poetry-and-music ensemble Third Wind, and presently
contributes to the Lawrence Poets Laureate group. He is also a
longtime fan of science fiction, and performs with eclectic-Celtic
folk-rock band Wild Mercy. He has subsidized such activities by
editing computer books since the 1990s.