Two
poems from K.E. Duffin's Spolia
followed
by a note on the author
The
Goldfinch
Just
before the explosion of feathers from the cage
of your little water-drawer, there was a distracted look
in God's eye, beady and bright with age
like sudden night. Then a gaudy banner shook
above
your heart, stripping your smoky soul
whose glance is still alive on its favorite perch.
Neither of you destined to grow old.
Mourners in stunned light crowd the church.
O
Fabritius. Faber, Maker, Mater.
From
beneath this blue umbrella – no sky at all –
I see the golden and red daubs, regimental,
the beak so eager to open, as if to speak
a second before escape, before the streak…
but
caught unawares, with a rustle only to burst
instead through the Lion Gate – a tiny bird.
Mountaineer
With
the alabaster torso of a prizefighter
KO'd in the ring, or a would-be swimmer through gravel
whose butterfly stroke struck the pseudo-water
of talus rubble and was instantly stilled,
stripped to the waist of your flimsy rags,
your tanned hands flung out like a shaman's,
you seem more like a sailor drowned on the crags
of a drained sea than a nubile faun
who pranced for a painter. Oblivious to your bashed-in head
whose reddish death-hair grew for several days,
your twig-snapped leg, "Get up" the sky said
decade after decade. Everything about you decays
except your body. Friends grew old and died.
Embryos of embryos found you on the mountainside.
©
K.
E. Duffin was born in New York City and studied at Harvard.
Her first book of poems, King Vulture, was published
by The University of Arkansas Press in 2005. Her work has appeared
in Agni, Bellingham Review, Chelsea, Denver
Quarterly, Harvard Review, Hunger Mountain,
the New Orleans Review, Ploughshares, Poet
Lore, Poetry, Poetry East, Prairie Schooner,
Rattapallax, the Sewanee Review, Southwest Review,
Verse, and many other journals. Her poems have been featured
on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily. Duffin is also
a painter and printmaker. She lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.
.
"The
Goldfinch" first appeared in Ellipsis, and "Mountaineer"
first appeared in Columbia Poetry Review.If
you need more, please let me know. Further information can also
be found on my author's website, www.bruceberger.net
