This page will be changing frequently, though I can’t say how frequently. I’ve got a large body of work to choose from here, so it should be some time before it starts repeating itself. Most of it is from one unpublished collection or another, from the very early The Book of Alchemy, which I started as an undergraduate, studying with Sandy Sterner in Pittsburgh; through The Heart’s Cathedral, written mostly in graduate school while I was working with Diane Wakoski, and out of which Blue Stone Press published a chapbook by the same name; and finally including three unfinished collections that I worked on in a desultory manner in the ’90s: Here in the Room with Pain, Rituals and Objects, and What We Are, What We Become. There are also a few orphans that don’t seem to fit anywhere, even with a shoehorn.
From about 1994 until just after September 11, 2001, I’d been concentrating more on my fiction, though I was taking some of my poetry and adapting it for inclusion in my novel, Prospero’s Daughter, which is as much about the magic inherent in words as anything else. Then, as disasters often do with me, the events of 9/11 sparked something of a torrent of poems, after I’d had some time to process what had happened, and the result was Stories From the Ruins. It’ll be some time before any of those appear here, because the book is just coming out. If you’d like to see where some of the rest of these poems have ended up, you can look at my list of publications.
Check back frequently, if you like what you see. You may be able to hear it too, if I find a good sound program.
I’ll resist the temptation to introduce any of these, or talk about why I wrote them, but if you want to discuss them, or ask me about them, please feel free to write me.
I am untethered here, solitary.
No earth hugs my knees like children; no tug on my limbs but my own sinews, muscles, neurons.
I stand on aurorae with my back to oases
not green but other spectral colors,
blue Spica, Orange Arcturus, yellow Procyon,
white Altair—
names more exotic than Morocco, Tunis
—with a waste black as volcanic sand
between.
The air's envelope blues
as I view it:
haloed Tibet
so close to nothing,
where snow falls like meteors,
fast, trailing vapor,
the air too thin to hiss:
or grows in layers like shed pelts
left as clouds scratch against peaks.
From this vantage, this pedestal,
this lookout, this exile
on the fringes,
old air sulfurous with smelting steel
clears—
My Roman 'chute skids on the orbiting wind,
half-open, half candle.
© Lee Kottner 1985
This one
has the tiniest of chisel marks
on the round cheeks.
Time has sent
a great crack down one,
splitting the face open
from forehead to chin,
letting the light in.
This one,
smooth and grey,
adorned with lichen,
has sat so long
that one knee fell off,
leaving the rough edges
inside visible,
and the lower leg
disconnected
yet still part of the whole.
This one
of sandstone
—so impermanent—
rain or sorrow has pitted
like smallpox
leaving scars behind.
The mouth is still kind.
This one
sits on a hard cushion:
feet numb, knees aching, and butt burning,
heart split open, embracing,
mind clear as water.
© Lee Kottner 2008
Some of us it broke,
the ones who were already fragile,
or who thought themselves
the center, and could not hold
in this new and sudden vortex.
Some were made the center
by character and action
or unwittingly by chance
and bore it with a fierce grace.
Some it brought a moment of clarity
wrapped in smoke and ash.
Some it plunged into darkness,
or made their own lurking night starless, moonless,
unnavigable.
Some, who'd known war, it brought
memory,
and to those who hadn't,
revelation.
Some rose to the occasion,
some fell
never to rise again.
Many slates were wiped clean.
Some lost love, and a few gained only fear
and a new shrillness.
Some seized the opportunity
disguising it as vision, while
many of us, wandering, inhaled the dust of demolition
and cremation,
leaving more than lungs scarred,
and the memory of a hot electric stench
that will never mean anything else.
Just this one event
to tumble everything we thought we were
into everything we truly were
before, making us
what we are now,
after.
–10 September, 2006, The Bronx, NYC
© Lee Kottner 2006
I was ten, twelve,
well-versed
in the subtle manifestations of evil
children and the faithful
hold true and hold to.
Two disciples, we
walked fearlessly into a field,
my mother and I, to preach
to the old man dowsing there,
protected by youth and belief.
It was midsummer in a rolling meadow,
sun high and hot for up north,
in a rank of sandy hills
punctuated with artesian springs.
Tall grass whished against
our bare knees and skirt hems, buzzing
with cicadas and ‘hoppers, all creation
busy, even the water
flowing somewhere below us.
I don’t remember what we said,
confronted with such superstition
—only the object:
the thick and quivering end
of the y-forked branch
in the old man’s hands,
the smell of sap still on it,
and his smile when he said
“touch it,” amazement
in his own voice. I did.
It dipped and bucked
hard though he held it loosely,
hands unmoving,
something more inexplicable in it
than thirst or the Devil.
As we turned our backs to him,
walking away, I wondered:
Is it the rod that seeks the water
or the water that draws the rod?
Years later, I recognize in that question
the crumbling of foundations
undermined by reaching water below
and the vibrating bow of wood above.
Since then, I’ve done
my own divining:
hands held out trembling
like that young sapling,
heartwood calling to deep waters, or
water to wood, whichever it is,
but finding only
an answering stillness.
Water finds its own level
unless the rock is struck.
© Lee Kottner 2003