Readings in Contemporary Poetry

Richard Kenney


HOW I USED TO WISH


How I used to wish

watching out across the wet road bed's 

black glide--the usual:

shell-shore of the first world

willed back in a blink,

ling cod, then, thickening the ocean like

Life with Time:

               No time, by God!

good night now licking

eyelids up in some immense, sleep-swimming 

immemorial armored fish,

fusion mirrored there on that flat nerve,

novas and so forth, symmetries,

this smattering of energies,

G-force veering to the simple 

solipsism of the born starts: sol

mating with himself himself in that fresh

electric swamp where further fetchlights

limn away all wavery and settling

long before nylon stockings ever

were or lunatic desire

seared us, just void,

volts and amps and the blue hiss

isn't it? -- and then that's this.

© 1995



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