W. Todd Kaneko
—
ELEGY FULL OF ANIMAL PARTS
My heart is a nest for your shadow, clear
November for a swag of black feathers
against snow. My oven is that hollow
where sorrow bursts with fat, where grief is
cavitied for flesh. Prayer makes us
explain ourselves to ourselves, crows
jagged where we once had canary song
because our hearts make up a forest,
deciduous where we gather, pigeon dark
for the frost. The woods are full of animal
sounds—donkey bray, hog bawl, that scrape
of tongue against uvula, tooth against stone
for tender sparks. You are hooves and hair.
You are vertebrae and memory of hot breath
because my heart is a tongue of flame, tiny
where it has settled into this wreath of awful
bones—nowhere to go, nothing but sleep
now that the antler is free of the buck,
the wing is free of the sky and flesh
is free from the spirit, from the spit,
from the mouth that that has promised
to swallow us all back into the earth.
BLACK HOLE
One day it will be possible to see
things that are impossible
to see, like the living are unable
to see ghosts, like I am unable
to see how impossible the sky is
when my son points
at a streetlight and says
the moon, like heaven
can ever be tethered to the ground,
like a boy can refuse to look
at the world in front of him,
at the glimmer and grime hidden
by tricks of light. My father took me
to church once, asked me to kneel
in prayer and when I sat on my hands
he kneeled without me,
eyes squeezed shut like I was
not there with him, like he is no longer
here on earth, like I will no longer
be here on earth for my son, one day.
Ask me any question about faith—
the moon, I will say because
maybe there is something out there
watching us from the gloom
of space, like we can understand
how to live together in the dark.
W. Todd Kaneko is the author of the poetry books This Is How the Bone Sings and The Dead Wrestler Elegies. He is co-author with Amorak Huey of the poetry chapbook Slash/Slash and Poetry: A Writers’ Guide and Anthology. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Alaskan Quarterly Review, Massachusetts Review, The Normal School, Barrelhouse, Verse Daily, Poetry Daily, the American Academy of Poets Poem-A-Day, and elsewhere. A Kundiman Fellow, he lives with his family in Grand Rapids, Michigan where he teaches at Grand Valley State University.
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