#david keplinger

Ice: Poems

Life On Earth — Photo-Artistry by kenne Life On Earth… LIFE ON EARTH is pulled down hard on a man’s head.This life was made by hatters.A busy street is only coffee, bread, and hats.The smell of a man’s hat – an old man’s hat –is like the nostril of a horse.You are breathing in what something beautifuland ancient has breathed out.The heat and life contained in it, the silk interior.An old man’s…

Keplinger, director of the American University’s MFA creative writing program, presents his fourth collection of poems, a series of symmetrical pieces that consider identity as a mesh of the unique and the shared.

To feel each branching-outward part. I do not feel each part, though I have prayed to hear the small breath of my cells at Wet Mountain. The aspen grove sends messages in leaf-code to its heart, a clutch of roots. Mildew zones out in provinces. Burn up, burn up, the yellow aspen says, burn up—which is another way of saying remember who you are, as you move in your beautiful, arched- upward body, believing yourself your own kingdom, believing yourself to be only yourself, instead of the land.