DAVID CAPPS

David Capps is a philosophy professor at Western Connecticut State University.
He is the author of three chapbooks: Poems from the First Voyage (The
Nasiona Press, 2019), A Non-Grecian Non-Urn (Yavanika Press, 2019), and
Colossi (Kelsay Books, 2020). He lives in New Haven, Connecticut (USA).

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Dawn

At dawn
we awaken
to ourselves
finely painted
in its mirror;
mother &
father have
stepped out
for a moment
don't notice
their shadows
chatter as they
shout; yet
how quietly
a blue fog
has enveloped
the garden-
surrounding
woods

a still disk
of an antique
merry-go-round
upended glee
the blue fog
seeps into
its foundation,
the still disk
red and alive
at the edges
paint chips
crumble into
its hollow urn
as sounds
of distant
shouting pick
up, pick up

the blue fog
all the way
through to
the backseat
of a minivan
abandoned
in the woods,
bombed-out,
bashed-in,
ransacked,
railed upon
except for this:

a old novel
under the seat,
its front cover
dusty, dress
still somewhat
damp from
the blue fog
of memory
yet legible, it is
mysterious how
dawn resists,
how it reiterates
ourselves to
ourselves, Anna
Karenina.






Center

We must begin, for the first time,
to see ourselves each as a center,

as important as a center is among
infinitely many points of light.

No light reflects back on itself,
each sun's rays extend outward,

perhaps forever, perhaps until
reaching in and through another

center. This black and checkered
sky, this ghostly nebula and haze,

what is it really, but a white sheet
of light, turning over and turning,

a deft fate. Anna Karenina's eyes
widening as the train approaches,

sky obliterated in the clasp of metal,
a gaze I can maintain only so long.

Anna Karenina as a way to describe
this center—yourself, drawn up into

long reaches of shadows, while my
face grows old, yours does not.

Momentarily, your bright laughter
freezes vortices of the growing

plenum I imagine you become.
In the depths of the forest we hear

our mother's voice; so upon waking
there is one voice, yours within it.






Midway

I suppose that to be lost, or to be eternally forgotten, are the same.

In spring, robins brush up against the windowsill, pretending.

Sparrows dash on the ground, bathe in the plane tree dirt.

Feeling such immensity I would hesitate to call it feeling.

Not much hangs on supposition, earth's opening and closing.

Two-inch fissures near broken glass where a bird cleans its wing.

A kind of dance called swing, topsy-turvy, swatting the holidays.

Gathers some small seed near the picnic bench maybe a crumb.

Something the last person ate. The bench is a fixture feeling.

Panicky, its snow globe held in place by screws and glue, we think.

We know, looking down, some carved initials, some red ink.

'Hope begins in tragedy'. It's odd to be the bird, to not have a thought.

Floating in this head or out of the cruelty of a dream. It would be odd.

I try writing down a dream I shouldn't have remembered.

There went the children of that dream on a road trip that never ends.

Anna Karenina sits in the back seat of the van as trauma therapy.

Their mother was murdered. She brushes her hair. They go on.

Dog-earing the poor pages of their one shared possession, riding

Through the miserable seasons, laughing only sometimes.

Back to Front.