By: Jonathan Heidenreich
To Be Found in Festivals
for Kaitlin
Keeping a winter court
at the base camp of coffee grounds
we learn that climbing is a love language
The praising of caterpillars
becomes unnumbered verse
dispersed through
leafy cathedrals
crowned in
brown-butter-drowned
afternoons
Rivers can't help but ramble
when in love
Skirting the curtsey
of merchant stalls
these hazel days dangle,
drop
from Heron calls-
the currency of a river witch
scattered
as it falls
Here, between a course
of garnet rings
finger-dancing
as a drunken kettle sings
"Be mine"
She bleeds the day
of its silvers and Citrines
A lion craft-
for while all others were looking,
we were watching
It's only proper,
tipping our saucers
to the Renaissance
between tea leaves
Hidden there
where words fall apart
She heralds
the laughing of the
bells
Forever still
beveled between
Marrakesh and Memories
of Prague
we inspect intently
two kings contently
in check.
Pagan
Fools would let reason
infect
the wild of damp rye
or demystify
the piping calliope
of a sigh
their bridled look-
all gavel and gallows
digests as easy
as icebergs
But while eyelids bark
echoing glances
in the twin-wisdom
of competing silence
learn the shredded
pleasure of
muzzle-skin, gnawing
chawing
without and within
speaking is Becoming
lean to the world when it whispers –
Meet me in the Avalanche
Sample the Albatross
Atlas is laughing...
Far from this,
true portent
reeks singular:
the lone sock
an unfinished sneeze
a photograph of Plath
left colorless
Where's the sin
in reading the mind of a
typhoon?
climbing ladders
in the dark?
sinking in the
pathos
of a broken flower pot?
Feel all things
ferociously
if only
to find, more and more
that God's the Bull
and not
the Matador
December Fair at Spirit Hall
Epigraph
Epilogue
Epitaph
Memory is wilier than sequence.
Anthology of waves
aware of itself
splashing random
like freehand filigree
(at least it is for me)
Often in its teasing
the book sellers appear
scales of small press
calico
a phalanx between
firm and fragile
Eyes graze
palms glance
hesitation is an invitation
to dance
Leather spines
sweat sugar cane
My fingers snag, then clasp
with the nagging drag
of a rasp
Bury me in such
terrarium musk
paper panels open
inward
Yellowing
bellowing
cinder king
foxed-lips singing—
I'll be in the fire,
If you need me.
I reach for Heaney
and know myself
(overstated and undone)
a black light behind the sun
But pity, being fibrous
pills
catching the bullet train
to entropy
Focus goes the way
of the Scythians
trampling broadsides with
reckless imagining
cataloging
what I cannot afford
Born at the end
Piscean
the “Exit” sign
(red godhead)
leads away from the self
a procession pointing
true north
drumming its final tattoo
Underneath, steel teeth
cave
like column flutes on the Acropolis
finding that light is
raw laughter
chambered in direction
Bucking upstream
I draw the hand of Roethke in our water
pleading
Plunge me further, Father
that I may become a reef
without need of memory.
Now when I return to
where screams are born —
late to the work I hate
blame spreading
like arteries in moss agate
I beg to be again
crammed in the crawl space
between periods.
Jonathan Heidenreich is a classical actor, director, and Secondary English educator . Jonathan is a suma cum laude graduate from Point Park University, and the founder and executive director of the Pittsburgh Shakespearean theatre co. 'Food for Groundlings. His writing has appeared in print and online in such poetry publications as Wingless Dreamer and Sons and Daughters. Recently Jonathan was short-listed for the international Wingless Dreamer Poetry Prize.
"To Be Found in Festivals:
I rarely set out with a fixed objective when I construct a poem. I’ve never been one for the restriction of prompts, externally or self-imposed, so in this I have few pieces that can be easily classified as wholly one type of poem (confessional, romantic, elegy, and so on). An exception to this is To Be Found in Festivals which from start to finish was always going to an unabashed tribute to the love of my life, who is herself a poet. I set out to distill our first year together and honestly capture the essence of our partnership, and what eventually presented itself was a never-ending series of excursions away from the world and into ourselves. The images of these retreats, great and small, needed not so much to be organized as allowed to fall randomly into place, and that is where the sense of movement within the poem derives. Hopefully the piece achieves an organic stride in its leaps between the natural world and the one that only revolves around two people- a dance that has always been at the heart of our love.
Pagan:
Simply put, this piece (which can feel more prescriptive than the rest of my work) came about as an affirmation of why I write poetry. As a genre, poetry offers little in the way of a commercial success, financial stability, or even validation. The temptation to curtail your voice to suit marketability can be oppressive as rejection letters roll in as quickly as your submissions roll out. It was at one such point of frustration with the nature of the publication game, early in my writing, that I doubled down on my “style”( if I can be said to have established one) and continued following the themes, musicality, and devotion to textured language that I believe defines my art. It was at this point that the tides turned in my meager success with publications, and I wanted to avow in writing a sort of statement of intent going forward regarding who I am as a poet.
December Fair at Spirit Hall:
If there is any motif I hope to impart throughout my poetry, regardless of the subject of a poem, it is a love affair with textured language, and how the honesty of that relationship bleeds into life and memory. This piece is essentially a desperate groping for the ripcord that is inflated memory when self-realization is exchanged daily for safe monotony. As a sidelined educator and writer, juggling multiple jobs outside his field, I bristle, as I believe many do, at work/activity that does not inherently ignite a sense of fulfillment. This is not an issue of mindset, but what I feel is repulsion on a molecular level for time wasted living outside my truth just to get from one meal to the next. So, often in these tug-of-wars between what is practical and what is purposeful, vents appear that serendipitously release my frustrations and allow me to shrug the present for moments that likely weren’t intended to be future touchstones of identity. These escapes, for me, are provided by those poets whose own love affair with intense language has left a sort of living Braille for others to run their fingers over when the demands of the world and the demands of the artist feel forever incompatible. One such escape was born during an hour between work shifts when my fiancée and I ran to attend a local book fair where we had previously first kissed. The release we found in the space was severed by demands of a side job I would’ve been late for had we stayed longer, and that elation cut with frustration served as the basis for this poem."
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