Our Trespasses

The monks do not wish to be observed
The signpost said in five languages.

I entered, hushed,
To a parking lot and a brick wall.

By the only door, a telephone booth.
I imagined rain falling, each soul's

Brief transparence.



Truths

Giving up, knowing I'm done for.
Every step back to my car a bad haircut.

What have I done to deserve this?
My daughter on the bus, her eyes in the window,

Oblivion stenciled there.
Can it possibly merit a decade

Of slammed doors, a clinic downtown,
Betty Boop displayed like a storefront

On a shoulder blade?
She'll understand some day I hope

To tell the truth even when it hurts.
Why did I say sorry then?

Every step a shattered beer bottle.
My daughter's six-year-old back

As she managed the awkward hulk of the stairs,
The pale rebuke of her ears.



Mr. Magnifico

She hates him at parties when he oh so casually
Picks up whatever's at hand—tennis ball, two pears—
And starts in, daring the other party goers
To toss up whatever they want, no limits, until
He's got the whole room buzzing around him,
Throw pillows, celery tray, Ed Simmon's toupee,
His face rapt like that of some Christian martyr
Before the lions were loosed, the tinder fired.

Is she the only one who catches the drudge
Of his hands, as they grab, snatch, and flail,
Obeying him, and him only? If only they knew
What she knows, even as she drinks herself blind,
Her body rising like a trailer in a Technicolor tornado,
Passed oh so casually from one hand to the next.



Fallen

We forgot most of it and what we remembered
Mattered less than we thought.

We woke by a stream, a kind of song we might have sung
When our tongues still knew praise.

What frightened us: air
And how we needed to measure our selves,

As if too much and we'd unmaster
this wheezy concertina of flesh.

And night, how it clotted our sight, made our lives
A large rock we had to circumnavigate by touch

Until we saw our hands, their dying glow,
And our arms, new hair like broiled feathers.



Nobody, Listening

He studied with nobody.
Ate with nobody. Slept with nobody.

When he woke up in the morning
nobody was singing to him in the shower.

At work, he called nobody all day,
and nobody called him.

Nobody pleased him no end.
Caught staring up the street and asked who

he was looking at, he'd say, Nobody.
With nobody, he did plenty of nothing.

Sometimes he imagined the number of nobodies
a painter could paint on a match head.

He prayed and prayed to nobody:
if God is infinite, he reasoned, God must be

an infinite number of nobodies.
When this kind of thinking got him down

out came the T shirt that read
Nobody loves you like your mother.

Ekleksographia:
Wave Two

November, 2009

Poems

Kurt Olsson

Kurt Olsson's first book of poetry, What Kills What Kills Us, won the 2005 Gerald Cable Book Award (Silverfish Review Press, 2007). In 2008, the book was awarded the Towson University Prize for Literature, given annually to the best book published by a Maryland writer, as well as named Best Poetry Book of 2008 by Peace Corps Writers. Olsson's poems have appeared in many journals, including Poetry, Field, The New Republic, and The Threepenny Review. He also has two chapbooks to his credit: I Know Your Heart, Hieronymus Bosch (Portlandia Group, 2000) and Autobiography of My Hand (Bright Hill Press, 2006).