{"id":7968,"date":"2022-11-03T00:15:24","date_gmt":"2022-11-03T00:15:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artvilla.com\/plt\/?p=7968"},"modified":"2022-11-03T00:39:21","modified_gmt":"2022-11-03T00:39:21","slug":"verisimilitude-5-poems-by-askold-skalsky","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artvilla.com\/plt\/verisimilitude-5-poems-by-askold-skalsky\/","title":{"rendered":"VERISIMILITUDE. 5 Poems by Askold Skalsky"},"content":{"rendered":"
\r\nKEYS IN A ROW <\/strong> \r\n \r\nPerhaps someone\r\nwill play a melancholy\r\nkeyboard piece as I am\r\nleaving, and, stopping\r\nto listen, I\u2019ll have a vision\r\nof what is to come if I\r\nlinger, if I walk up\r\nto the player, wait,\r\nthen ask some pertinent\r\nquestion with an eager\r\nmien, the seconds gone\r\nwhen I would have been\r\noutdoors in the clear,\r\nthe moment interrupted\r\nwith a careless insufficiency,\r\nthe scattered patterns\r\nof my life converging\r\ninto a broken string,\r\na clappered wheel\r\non which the hours\r\ntick and dance to\r\ntheir inoperable end\r\n \r\n***\r\n \r\nto be released from a long\r\nslow slough, much of it\r\nimpenetrable like the circle\r\nof a dream manifest as reality,\r\nfrightful and avoidable,\r\na bag in a corridor laced\r\nwith shadows and squalor,\r\nwhich the mere eye of me\r\nis afraid to undo\r\n \r\n***\r\n \r\nmoving through\r\nthe veins, a fire-\r\nball with dim\r\nobbligatos and\r\ndark copper\r\nbangs, like old\r\nradiator pipes\r\nwhen the steam\r\nhammers at high\r\nvelocity into their\r\njoints, warming\r\nthe room and\r\nalmost waking\r\nthe sleeper from\r\nhis sleep\r\n \r\n***\r\n \r\nhere in this morning\u2019s morning\r\nself-forgotten sullen twang\r\ncomes a star gilded and silver,\r\nclimbing still like the pine\r\nbranches tipped with needle-\r\nfrantic green, yes, caught\r\nlike a tiny chip on the great\r\nwaist of some spectre surface\r\nemerging into the dissolving dark.  \r\n \r\nLANDSCAPE IN FALLEN LIGHT, WITH CHILDREN<\/strong>\r\n \r\nJust an unimportant place,\r\nradiant and ordinary,\r\ndeserving the utmost scriptory,\r\nwith golden quags\r\nup to the knees,\r\nthe sun blotting the lough\r\nlike streaks of silver haze\r\nsettling in a quay.\r\nNo need for a raveled sky\r\nof quizzical significance,\r\nthe wrangling heads\r\nfoundering in the streets,\r\nquesting the unending sop\r\nof memory and imprecation\r\nto put life into the big words,\r\nimmiserating the ivory dungeon,\r\nas one antinomian calls it,\r\nreduced to bah, to babbling ooze,\r\nslightly ecstatic now and then,\r\nwhat is preserved\r\nwhen meaning is deflated,\r\npage after page, of invisibility,\r\nof pity for hope lost\r\nin hell\u2019s sunken bolgias,\r\nor the faces strapped\r\nto the skullbones\r\nof the starving young. \r\n \r\n NOW THEN, THE OPEN EYE  \r\n <\/strong>\r\nAugust\u2019s close\r\nbut I already feel\r\nthe solitary cold,\r\na sleepless place\r\nand zero of the night,\r\nlike an infinitive\r\nwithout an end\r\nand half reluctant\r\nto begin. But solitude\r\nis just a postlude\r\nto the now where all\r\nthe wrongs set in,\r\na moment\u2019s atom\r\nout of kilter,\r\nout of being true,\r\nwhere finally the heart\r\nmay intermit its beat\r\nwith careless equanimity\r\nor grave abandonment\r\nlike a nimbus\r\nwith its watery crystals\r\nof deep ice,\r\nwashing the sorrows\r\nfrom your face,\r\nfrom all the lineaments\r\nof being you.\r\n \r\n \r\nVERISIMILITUDE<\/strong>\r\n \r\n                   After a passage from a novel by Virginia Woolf\r\n <\/em>\r\nSomewhere in the middle\r\nI recall a brewer\u2019s cart\r\nand the genial narrator\r\ndescribing the gray horses \r\nthat had upright bristles\r\nof straw stuck in their tails\r\nlike sprouting plumes\r\nabove the small brown daisies\r\npeeping from their haunches\u2019 clefts.\r\nAnd a woman, seeing\r\nthis slipstream brook\r\nof burblings through her mind,\r\nimmediately brightens,\r\nand sorrow drops away\r\nlike a feathered colander\r\nsifting the prismatic richness\r\nof her life, kindling with equine\r\npleasure an infinite hubble-bubble\r\nof mysterious commotion\r\nout of the  pernicious flurries\r\nof gone time, a lollop on horsetail\r\nstreams with straw-thatched coronets,\r\nwhimsical and vagulous,\r\nlike sea-green sprites,\r\nbedraggled by happiness\r\nand blessed with silly dreams.\r\n \r\nPROBLEM, SOLUTION, ETC.<\/strong>\r\n \r\nHer academic pedigree\r\nwas impressive--Swarthmore,\r\nColumbia and the Sorbonne.\r\nBut toward her hundredth year\r\nshe confronted her biggest source\r\nof perplexity and vexation,\r\nthe state of being weary\r\nand restless through lack of interest,\r\nand began her day\r\nwith crossword puzzles,\r\nthen the game shows on TV.\r\nDid she return to these\r\nas the day continued to impair\r\nitself by attrition?\r\nRamakrishna used to rebuke\r\ncard-playing oldsters\u2014\r\nHad they nothing better to do\r\non the verge of their greatest change\r\nof outward form or appearance?\r\nAre crosswords any better?\r\nShould Kurtz have done puzzles\r\nin the dark,  filling words into a pattern\r\nof numbered squares in answer\r\nto correspondingly numbered clues\r\nto prevent facing the abyss\r\nbefore him, the memories in him?\r\nWhat is a six-letter word\r\nfor a painful emotion\r\ncompounded of loathing and fear?\r\n<\/pre>\n
\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n
Bio: Originally from Ukraine, Askold Skalsky has published poems in over 300 online and print periodicals in the United States, Canada, England, Ireland, mainland Europe, Turkey,  Australia, and India. He is the recipient of two Individual Artist Awards in Poetry from the Maryland State Arts Council, and is the founding editor of the literary magazine Hedge Apple<\/em>. A first book of poems, The Ponies of Chuang Tzu<\/em>, was published in 2011 by Horizon Tracts in New York City. He is currently at work on several poetry projects, including a poetry cycle based on Gertrude Stein\u2019s Tender Buttons<\/em>. A book of poetry, Shapeless Works of Partial Contemplation<\/em>, is due to be published by Ephemeral Arts Press in November.
\n 
\n 
\n 
\n 
\n 
\n 
\n 
\n 
\nRobin Ouzman Hislop is Editor of Poetry Life and Times<\/a> at Artvilla.com <\/a>; You may visit Aquillrelle.com\/Author Robin Ouzman Hislop <\/a> about author & https:\/\/poetrylifeandtimes.com<\/a> See Robin performing his work Performance (University of Leeds)<\/a><\/p>\n
Share and Enjoy !<\/h3>
<\/i><\/span>Shares<\/small><\/div>
<\/i><\/span><\/a><\/span>\n<\/i><\/a><\/span>\n<\/i><\/a><\/span>\n<\/i><\/a><\/span>\n<\/i><\/a><\/span><\/div><\/div><\/div>
<\/i><\/a><\/span>\n<\/i><\/a><\/span><\/div><\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
KEYS IN A ROW Perhaps someone will play a melancholy keyboard piece as I am leaving, and, stopping to listen, I\u2019ll have a vision of what is to come if I linger, if I walk up to the player, wait, then ask some pertinent question with an eager mien, the seconds gone when I would … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[978,808,796,401,43],"tags":[18,136,3],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artvilla.com\/plt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7968"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artvilla.com\/plt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artvilla.com\/plt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artvilla.com\/plt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artvilla.com\/plt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7968"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.artvilla.com\/plt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7968\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7973,"href":"https:\/\/www.artvilla.com\/plt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7968\/revisions\/7973"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artvilla.com\/plt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7968"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artvilla.com\/plt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7968"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artvilla.com\/plt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7968"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}