Poetry Magazine

Kevin D. Prufer

USA

kdp8106@cmsu2.cmsu.edu

Kevin Prufer is the author of two books of poetry. The first, STRANGE WOOD, was awarded the 1997 Winthrop Prize (now the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize). The second, THE FINGER BONE, is forthcoming in 2002 from Carnegie Mellon University Press. He is also editor of the THE NEW YOUNG AMERICAN POETS (Southern Illinois University Press), an anthology of poems by poets in their 20s and 30s. It was named by the American Library Association and BOOKLIST as one of the 10 best poetry books of 2000.

Prufer was born in 1969 in Cleveland, Ohio, and educated at Wesleyan University, the Hollins University Writing Program, and Washington University. He is now an associate professor in the creative writing program at Central Missouri State University, where he also edits PLEIADES: A JOURNAL OF NEW WRITING and, since 1999, has co-directed the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Series. In 2001, he received both the Prairie Schooner/Strousse Award and a Pushcart Prize for poetry. His newest work also appears in PLOUGHSHARES, BOULEVARD, THE SOUTHERN REVIEW, WITNESS, CHELSEA, NEW LETTERS, and other journals.

His work can also be found on-line at POETRY DAILY (www.poems.com), ELECTRONIC POETRY REVIEW (www. poetry.org), SHAMPOO (www.shampoopoetry.com), PLOUGHSHARES (www.pshares.org), and NOTRE DAME REVIEW (www.nd.edu/~ndr)

ADVANCE PRAISE for THE FINGER BONE
(Carnegie Mellon, 2002)

Kevin Prufer's new poems spin us into bizarre, occasionally uncomfortable recognitions. They do it through language so imaginatively brilliant that even the ominous and the sad are imbued with pleasure. I have not encountered such an exciting book in years.

--Susan Ludvigson

Kevin Prufer's poems alchemically translate the mundanities of suburban life into mysteries; they perform a kind of transubstantiation in which the inner life becomes the outer world. Computers and hallucinations co-exist, and yards and parking lots become a paysage moralisé, a psychological landscape of risk and loss and possibility. He hears the beating hearts of cars and the wail of a newborn city, the sighs of school desks and the flute music of a hollow bone. Prufer is a conjurer of the quotidian, summoning up phantasms of the everyday. Those ghosts turn out to be our own.

--Reginald Shepherd

Kevin Prufer's remarkably assured second book embraces the things of the world, but reminds us that "Things are Inherent in Things," and that the inherent is often terrible: there is a "bone in the ice cream," or, in the throat, "a song / where a stinger hurt." The trajectory of the book is flawless. Wings flutter through it, wasps, bees, moths and angels metamorphosing into one another; beauty is observable everywhere, but is so subject to disruption by disaster that "Writing the Accident" becomes the obsession of the book's second section. Through the eyes of various imagined scientists, Prufer takes us both beyond and more deeply into the mysteries of loss and distance, allowing the book to erupt into a finale of elegy that seems as strange as it is inevitable. Prufer knows there is no beauty without disaster, no pastoral without elegy, no clarity without mystery. Through language and observation that are both clear and constantly transformative, Prufer takes us on a remarkable journey that is likely to change the way we see ourselves and our world, our living and our dead

--Martha Collins

The Astronomer's Dream
first published in River Styx, 2000

The sky fell into the telescope—a tumble, then a dying
gasp. I sighed and scraped my toe on the observatory floor,

twisted the straps that held my glasses on, smiled.
The sky was a zero, an empty shell. When the data

stopped, the computer was a wreckage
of frozen points of light, confounded. The printer died

so I heard my breaths now loud as the whirr
of wheels that turned when I set the telescope

on a new and empty quadrant. Freedom, I thought,
my fingers at the soft focus. Simple and quiet.

All my life the stars were angry little sighs,
needle-pricks of breath. The sky coughed their light over me

so I’d grown accustomed and set my nights by them.
What more was there to say? I screwed the lens caps back

to bottle the starlight in. I shut the lamps
and closed the door behind me. The night was a wonder

of shadowless trees, a giant thrall—a wheeze from the dome
where the sky now was, then nothing at all.

 

Death Comes in the
Form of a Pontiac Trans Am
first published in Flint Hills Review

When I have fears that I may cease to be,
I think of death that revs and growls, backfires,
stops for none, is cherry red and sleek,
eats Honda Civics, coughs, and spits out wires.

It doesn't approach, but, boom, it appears,
growling where its muffler ought to be.
It has no sense of sin—but it has gears.
It shifts them when it must, but grudgingly.

It will not purr—it spits its awful stutter,
then roars these words: I want, I will, I am.
It flattens snakes, knocks dogs into the gutter.
It speaks American. It speaks American.

 

    
MY OTHER SELF
First published in River City, 2000

    
I don’t want to hear how his heart starts like a war each morning,
how dawn throws fistfuls of bullets on his doorstep with the paper,
how he doesn’t bleed.
		            When he laughs it is like someone twists a key
and a tank starts up, then, groaning in the pistons, rolls over a platoon. 
Godammit, men! he says to the ants on the windowsill.  You gotta take
that ledge, and them snipers, too!  	
				The soldiers love his beautiful scar,
the way it slides over his forehead like a heroic vein.  They love the bulge
in his holster and the sand in his hair.  I don’t want to hear it.


My boots are too big and my pants won’t fit.  I don’t have a chamber
to fit my bullets.  Often, in the morning, when the sun 
slides through the barracks like a long sigh, 
       I cry cold tears 
all over my pillow until I disappear.  There is a fleck of gold
on my lips.  Always, a shower of petals from my ears.  My teachers said 
I had an artistic streak,
		 	folding paperclips into tiny nymphs at my desk 
or worrying the curl that fell over my brow.  When my other self 
says, Seize that beach, boy! —when he says, Lock & load!—
I don’t know what to do with my hands. 

    
 

    
BLUE PITCHER, EMPTY AND FULL
first published in Ploughshares, 2001


You will use it for the flowers the others bring because he is dead.


Or you will use it for dark blue light, the arc of it when, the next evening, the 
              sun cries over the house and sends all the windows to the floor.  


A trill of orchids wilts over the rim.  You will use them for perspective.  
              The petals fall when you’re asleep like petals in dreams, dying to stop.


You will use them for silence, when the room is a rumble of passing trains
               and his picture rattles over the end tables. 


“You'll use it for flowers,” I said the other day, placing the blue pitcher on 
               the windowsill, turning it so it balanced there.  The windows were cold 
               to the touch because it was almost winter and the wind blew from the lake.


When the relatives left, the house was a hush.  The tracks bent into the 
                woods along the lake, the pitcher looking out the window like a great 
                blue eye.


I know you are reading this in the fragility of evening, when the rain 
                comes in from the lake and simmers over the house.  


I know you are reading in the half light, your fingers covered with 
                flour, the oven on and a silence from the kitchen where the bread 
                is baking.


The house juts over the lake on spindles.  The pitcher paints a blue arc on the 
                floor.  There is no one upstairs.

    
 

    
 

    
THE LUCKY CRIMINALS
First published in River City, 2000

    
We are not equal to our criminals.  A raftful floats by every day,
dainty blue canopies flaring in the breeze.  Cigarettes dangling

from downturned mouths, eyes screwed to the shore—
the criminals are slim and beautiful, draped

in their lawnchairs so their fingers leave trails in the river water.
They are sentimental and lean, shirtless and droop-eyed.

Oh to dig my tired toes into the soft mud of the bank, 
the pickpocket says.  To drop coins in the river and retrieve them,

to retrieve all the coins that have ever been dropped in the river.
The others are silent, smoke leaking from their mouths.  Wishes

are everything to criminals, and the burl of black clouds over the trees
is unimportant.    My father was buried with a mouthful

of stolen gems, the con-man replies, swiping his guitar.  I dug 
one hundred holes in the yard before I found them.   The black clouds

curl into mouths that rustle the trees.  Around their feet,
fifteen bags of coins.  The hacker picks his golden teeth, the falsely accused

stares hungrily to our shore.  Our women are in love with criminals.
They have the soft glow of lamplight on pavement on clear nights after rain.

How we envy criminal ambition.  We are strung like pearls 
on the weedy shore, white-faced and furious as they pass.  

Our dinner burns, our children cry, and the wind cools 
as the storm sweep over.  Justice, justice, we call to them. 

But the long-fingered criminals in their gorgeous swimsuits, 
the lawless with their guns draped over their chairs, the shifty-eyed 

and doomed with bare chests, the exciting—they’ll never notice us.

    
© All Copyright, Kevin D. Prufer.

      All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.