Kirk Robinson
Young Adult
I knew a girl
who took
to reading books
backwards;
She'd find everything
resolved, then
the rocky cliff
and the winding turns
and stumbles,
a rising action
that fell,
and last of all,
in the thin pages
of the beginning,
she'd learn
who it was,
amongst the cast,
standing alone
and beginning
a story.
Motion from the Floor
I don't want to see any more dance pieces that end
the way they begin. If the lights should come up
on a crumpled figure, downstage-left, let that figure
rise and be elsewhere when the stage lights dim
and the houselights chase us all away, because
it’s already bad enough to have to pull on the same coat
I draped over my seat, jingle the same set of keys,
drive the same car back home to the same set
of burned-out bulbs. Some theories
are irrefutable and can't be proved, like Actual Infinity
is a finite number until you add one. Try that one on
for size. And I don’t want to read any more essays beginning
and ending with the same unanswered question, same
authorial pose. James Joyce and riverrun ... there’s a book
I’ll never read. And poems, Lord help us—
the villanelle, the pantoum—forms that keep starting
over and over. No more start/finish lines either. Anybody can see
a marathon should end in a different part of the city.
Farewell Transmission
—for J.M.
Maybe you shouldn't leave a place
That will take you in;
Western and Division,
The Empty Bottle,
A light
in the cold black
we can hear.
If you leave,
a bottle
can pull you in whole.
At least the dark don't hide it.
When midnight comes
with the moon in her jaws
the North Star says,
Kid, you are so lost
even I can't bring you home
Physics
Even Isaac Newton admits
to pulling a number or two
out of the infinitely thin air;
his version
of a likely story -- each planet
fixed into a groove and the whole thing
running like clockwork: no intersecting
lines, gravity
a force so constant
everyone gets out alive.
It doesn't take a genius
to see those figures
won’t add up.
He was talking about unrequited passion
between stars, everything
maintaining a safe distance,
forever and always, as if two bodies
given nothing but time
wouldn't find one another.
Kirk Robinson is a poet from the Midwest who currently works as an Associate Professor of Humanities at Southern Vermont College. He is married, with four children. His work has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, RATTLE, and other quality magazines.