Two Poems

 

  by Virginia Konchan

 

 

 

 

Untoward Benediction

 

 

Some people are born with

disadvantages, like leprosy.

 

I say:  lace up those boot straps.

Go down swinging!  The first

 

are first, until they’re not.  Advice

for those recovering from moral

 

relativity:  develop opinions, cultivate

taste.  Rhetorical composition is nice,

 

but it’s nothing next to Tyger, Tyger. 

Preferential treatment is only sane: 

 

does not salmon kick the ass of pork? 

The sublime will be raised, not as

 

an idea, but a reality, with fangs.

Only an edible god is real. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Punctus Contra Punctum

 

 

The butcher’s wife’s death was messy. 

People moaned.  It was a wait stop death,

a now I love you death, yet was deliberate,

 

slow, in the collapsed space between what

one imagines might happen (a reprieve) and

what is actually happening (a bludgeoning). 

 

Wordsworth was right:  dissection is for fools,

and painting by numbers will always be a lesser

art.  Did you nail the kiss of death, the ghost of

 

Rachmaninoff asked the butcher, in his dreams.  The

resounding chord, was it ivory or white?  Monsignor,

he replied, before the desire for meaning gave birth

 

to music, and the desire for death to refinement of mind,

it was not difficult, but merely impossible, to hold

a note that trembled in the highest key of C. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poetry, fiction and reviews by Virginia Konchan have appeared in The New Republic, American Poetry Journal, Colorado Review, Mid-American Review, Jacket, Phoebe, 3 A.M. Magazine and The Wallace Stevens Journal.