Thomas Kane
How to: A Sestina
Thomas Kane is inconsolable—all ready to be fussy
and even at dust light. To a river
and to a june bug swallowing a river he says: To think,
of what I can’t repeat: The revelation of the lantern; plum
season; a cuttlefish right at feeding time. And why, again,
can each sestina not begin:
“I have been asked to advise you
that there is a human skeleton
(without limbs, limbs to follow)”—
a limb, maybe, for waking; a limb for shivering at the nearness
of a garden snake; a very large limb
on which to scratch our favorite prayers. Because how else are
we to understand
the poem but by making it a body? The body can have
all kinds of names. It can grow to be a wedding dress or a
little grave or—
Thomas Kane finds Ike Turner facedown in the creek weeds. He
knows him by the mynah bird sewn carefully onto his sport coat. Once
upright, Ike Turner sings the most beautiful church song Thomas Kane
has ever imagined.
How to: A Utopian Community
As if delivered from something, Thomas Kane takes
to the forest: Look at any wing. Look at the aspen trees. Look
at his ledger of imaginary kin. Look at the water &
who comes up from the water. The doll, crook-curled in the
doll couch, knows
a secret. Thomas Kane told her—They will meet here to write
us a psalm.
They are everyone we can think of. As once, all of Hamelin’s
children lived
in a hollowed out mountain. They drew from a rattle bag
their favorite playthings: a rocking chair, a pink ribbon, a stage,
a pen for making maps. Which is why it’s possible that
here, a hay bale sets by a pulpit and both are preached from;
a grandmother cozies up to James Thurber and divines him;
someone is captured and a lady in picture-pretty pearls misses
the way he loves. When Thomas Kane walks, he wishes. He wishes
how his most precocious doll might have a voice to say: In the forest,
I have seen everything: a bluebellied warbler, all sorts of singing,
a captain’s jacket.
Thomas, a captain’s jacket!