ONE NIGHT IN THE BERKSHIRES, BY DAVID KANN |
That August night the air was heavy with the scent of fallen fruit and ripe fruit riding the humid breeze, thick enough to blur the stars and ripple the pond, breaking the moonlight into bright coins and seducing the water with such perfumes it quivered with desire and mouthed the shore. Willows’ branches stirred in the silver air, barely caressing the water’s skin so that it shivered with desire so underwater eel grass writhed and rippled stroked fish and they moaned with lust, and dreamed in the wet dark of taking human shape, warm and rosy with blood's heat rising, with arms and legs to grasp and twine, palms cupped full delighting in what lips and tongues might do. And at the water’s hankering throb, thills fell to their knees, bowed their stone heads, worshiping flesh-prayers with a sad amen that split the green ground open, and at the sight, pale clouds woke from their slow drift and rushed into ashy heaps that tore open and thundered with a choral roar. The pond surged from its bed, reaching for the sky and filled the moon with such lust it poured its light across farms and towns. Old men in their feather beds, moon-drenched, remembered and found themselves rising and turning to their ready wives in the wet light. Young girls felt the moon’s gravity dreamily lifting them from their beds to float across the frosted land the hems of their nightgowns rippling around their ankles in the breeze of their passing. Farmboys dreamed themselves into cornfields waiting in the crackle of growing corn and the odor of moist soil hovering around them for the arrival of the goddesses gown-shed and naked in the shining night. And in their dreaming the old men and women learned how light the time’s weight might be And in their dreams of lust, light and lightness, and corn rising toward ripeness boys and girls found how heavy weightless desire might be. |
David Kann escaped the world of academic administration to return to teaching poetry and poetry workshops and writing, reminding himself that when writing poetry is working, he feels more like himself. His poems have appeared in Lunch Ticket, Forge, Stoneboat and The Sierra Nevada Review among others. His chapbook, The Language of the Farm, won the 2015 Five Oaks Press contest. Two other chapbooks, Blues for Pip and At Fernald School, have been published by Finishing Line Press.