Kenneth Irby
THREE POEMS

from [Studies]: [on Edmund Waller’s 400th birthday, 3 Mar 2006]
from [Studies]: [on Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s 200th birthday, 6 Mar
             2006]
from [Studies]: [on Benito Juárez’ 200th birthday (and J. S. Bach’s 321st), 21 Mar 2006)]

About Kenneth Irby

[on Edmund Waller’s 400th birthday, 3 Mar 2006]

              What Art is this, that with so little pains
              Transports us thus, and o’r our spirit raigns?
                                          —“Of my Lady Isabella playing on the Lute”


the boys were playing marbles on the street in Fort Scott a hundred years ago
and the police told them they were breaking the law and made them stop
and the boys said it was their right by the signing of the Declaration of Independence
Spring is marbles       is it still?
so hyacinths reach       and send abroad
taws and the taw call
and the Sun come down      Knucks down!
and shot across the ground
into terrestrial collision        like the stars

[on Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s 200th birthday, 6 Mar 2006]

so one tree will send out  branch to join another and be saved
so the rock wall and its climber
elusive records, books
in what other dimensions inter-live
and returning maybe or not staying
and only in the mind keeping
and the memory itself going
flake flaking flaky from the start itself
no way to throw another after to find
and in the far distance in the interstice
another orb coming
or maybe here its cloud

[on Benito Juárez’ 200th birthday (and J. S. Bach’s 321st), 21 Mar 2006)]

that this one house could carry two whole families
interpenetrant and withdrawing simultaneously and then be gone
but an ascendant stage of other things as mysteries
no more understood but undergone
than who would the life the next night be stayed with
and how get there and be here again
as lying across slabs of yellow stone
to stare close into the henbit in the snow
pink purple tongues of woods
and in the degrees of Spring
in the degrees of families we’ve made
rewelcomed       certainly rewelcomed
lifted and let fall       and got up and gone on from
and rewelcomed ever
as slow in the slow slow afternoon we are