Our place-based and occasional series on Philadelphia poets continues today with two poems from Michael Loughran. Check back Wednesday for another entry in the series.
Kafka
No one cares
about the painting of the orange rooster.
I hang it up and remember
whatever I want,
maybe what Kafka said
about me.
What a rooster he was
and how orange,
all those inclinations,
the black urge
to stroll through the hallways
of some other house,
every desire
an illicit constitutional.
Rooster! Don’t be funny!
Let me think!
Soon I’ll be
under the tongues
of the streetlights
at 60 m.p.h.
New Jersey
Hay bales!
The ones we prefer.
Golden stomachs
we drive past
wondering
about our mothers.
Future auditors
of the heart,
listen,
what we liked most
was to make
the hay bales blur.
We liked Rousseau,
whose epitaph
pleads he devote
his sacred
leisure to the light.
He painted no hay,
perhaps there is
no hay in France?
France! You have nothing.
THERMOS 