Guy Kettelhack

Body Language

Your muscles, limbs and torso think, and speak –
mercilessly delicate and unapologetic,
they regale, declare – gesturally fostering
opinions past the brink of the acceptable: too
possible to be believed; articulations far beyond
the tolerably bright: they weaken me – deceive:

I cannot fight their lexicons and libraries –
conjunctions: glinting, slick – soft juncture of the lips –
tight linen skin – swift prepositions: flicking wrist,
translucent blink – the diction of a pinkness like
a mist when fingers snap me out of stasis, script
the air – the gilding care with which they lavish

purely fleshly points: the tender awkward syntax
of the shoulders – jointed to arcane vocabularies
in the slender spine – in shy subordination
to the sweet inclining theme of you, the wash
of wafting clauses in the dream of you: completely
there – beyond all reach. You ruin speech.

I Sing For My Father

Sometimes I sing – like him – without
the least impingement – as if his
warm vibrato reappeared to flourish
in the hollow of my throat: and its
miraculously flowing swing permits

a small smug happy thing in me
to gloat: ha! – I can do it, I can do it,
I can – shoo it out the door to cry
and croon – implore – fly here,
fling there, emancipating air – no

yearning for an outcome anymore:
all gorgeously replete. His sweet
remembered voice begets my own
and he is back with me alive in
a duet. He won't allow me to forget.