Blackbird Archive
← v7n1, Spring 2008
Poetry · Volume 7, Number 1

Messina

David Keplinger

Take Messina: you’d be impressed and even sad

that I remember. The crag of mottled faces

In Messina you’re alone‚ available‚ the youth

in your face still rising. As if there’ll be no end

to youth and solitude‚ the sea below Messina

answers: solitude is beauty‚ even after you

Messina? I have never been. You told the story

quickly when I loved you; now here it is

exactly as you left it‚ its old stone faces

alternately old and then like children‚ elated by a fallen tooth.

memorytravellove
David Keplinger

David Keplinger is the author of three books: The Prayers of Others (2006), winner of the 2007 Colorado Book Award, and The Clearing (2005), both from New Issues Poetry & Prose, as well as The Rose Inside: Poems (Truman State University Press, 1999), chosen by Mary Oliver for the T.S. Eliot Prize of that press. He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. He is also the author of World Cut with Crooked Scissors (New Issues, 2007), which he co-translated with Danish poet Carsten Rene Nielsen. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Ploughshares, Florida Review, AGNI, Nimrod, and Minnesota Review. He currently teaches at American University in Washington, D.C.