An Excerpt from “Morning Knowledge” by Kevin Hart

Tales for the Spooky Season

Kevin Hart is a visionary writer who has taken his bearings as much from English Romanticism and European Modernism as from the Bible, Plato, and Meister Eckhart. Morning Knowledge is a book of elegies and love poems, prayers and lullabies, a book in which poems sing about a museum of shadows and about rats and afternoons, all wrapped in quatrains.

THAT SHADOW

It was immense, that shadow of the book
You read again today: you felt its dark
Encompass you and every word to come,
Or so you said,

And so the day went by, with trees and cats,
And so your death would sign each single deed
As though it could belong to you alone,
And share your bed,

And so the day will end, with cats and trees
Outside, in dark, as though a page has turned,
But not by you, and not a book you know
Or could have read.


RATS

Huge rats have run across our century
And burrowed deep inside some smiling truths.
They came up from the country, from the city;
They scrambled up our drains and over roofs

And burrowed deep inside some smiling truths;
We heard then rumors they lived up there,
They scrambled up our drains and over roofs
An ugly truth that we must learn to wear;

We heard thin rumors that they lived up there
And watched the darkness growing day by day,
An ugly truth that we must learn to wear,
And now their world is surely here to stay.

It wasn’t you, I know, it wasn’t me;
They came up from the country, from the city,
And you and I can simply look and see:
Huge rats have run across our century.


DARK BIRD

What do you want with me today, dark bird?
Why are you flying low, beneath that branch?
I know your shadow: you were long since gone,
My killdeer, rough-winged swallow, mourning dove,

Death play its flute with all your bones, dark bird,
You brood within my nest of breath, dark bird,
Your razor claw is in my eye, dark bird,
Sweet finches are in blossom here, dark bird,

My father’s dying now, dark bird, you know,
He feels your shadow now, dark bird, you know,
His bones are hollow now, dark bird, you know,
He’s turned to feathers now, dark bird, you know,

Take to another land, dark bird, fly now,
Go snap sweet sunflower souls, dark bird, fly now,
A thousand deaths await you there, dark bird,
Fly fast dark bird fly fast fly past dark bird.


AFTERNOON

A winter afternoon scraped to the quick;
I play some blues and let the music shine
And simply put my life away an hour
And live the time that only snow can give,

And so my life come back to me, as though
It were another’s fast, with clumsy heart
And feelings like a needle going wild
As snow falls quietly over New Orleans,

Over my childhood with its clingy nights,
Their grief grown big and ugly now I look,
And fierce, thin decades with their scribed riffs,
And fragile years I held then tore apart:

The evening is our homeland, and it lasts
Until our trouble is another shore
Seen only in you squint as darkness comes
In its own time, and takes us all away.

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