Art: Thomas Kräher, @tkraeher
WHERE YOU GET LOST OR GO ASTRAY
Walking among the city buildings
they turning into trees and the memory of trees
I think building-less thoughts
half-philosophical, half-recuperative:
where you get lost or go astray
where you court madness
or search for the abandoned
are the geographical underpinnings
of memory and self and biography
unwritten, spoken in code
adroitness in the words and pauses
and preparation for remembering
as you go deeper and deeper
into those old woods
woods that resembled a darkened city
what, you couldn’t have been much more than twenty
so many things not to touch or eat
so many things that had no concern for you
except to scurry out of your way
or criticize you from a distance
in unfamiliar language.
Did the fox point a rifle at you?
Was the owl recording your steps?
You bring the dissatisfaction with you
and it misaligns your view.
You walked up to a skyscraper
and it was a tree that mocked your hapless identification.
The car that made you jump from street
to pile of decaying leaves
the driver was a friend of fox and owl
without remorse or compunction
only a beauty as natural as night
you found your way out
the skyscraper welcoming you home
the police officer taking the information
for the missing-person’s report
looked somewhat like an owl
and you mention that
but too softly for anyone to hear.
About the author:
Fiction writer, poet, and playwright J. J. Steinfeld lives on Prince Edward Island, where he is patiently waiting for Godot’s arrival and a phone call from Kafka. While waiting, he has published eighteen books, including Anton Chekhov Was Never in Charlottetown (Stories, Gaspereau Press), Would You Hide Me? (Stories, Gaspereau Press), Misshapenness (Poetry, Ekstasis Editions), Identity Dreams and Memory Sounds (Poetry, Ekstasis Editions), Madhouses in Heaven, Castles in Hell (Stories, Ekstasis Editions), An Unauthorized Biography of Being (Stories, Ekstasis Editions), and Absurdity, Woe Is Me, Glory Be (Poetry, Guernica Editions). Over fifty of his one-act plays and a handful of full-length plays have been performed in Canada and the United States, including the full-length plays The Franz Kafka Therapy Session, The Golden Age of Monsters, and A Television-Watching Artist, and the one-act plays Godot’s Leafless Tree, The Waiting Ends, A Question of Eternity, The Entrance-or-Not Barroom, The Word-Lover, Laugh for Sanity, Back to Back, More Than Money, Imaginative Drinking, In a Washroom of a Prestigious Art Gallery, A Play of Disbelief, and Memory Sounds.
Art: Thomas Kräher, Switzerland, @tkraeher