CASTLE GARDEN

All art is a memory of age-old things, dark things
                      whose fragments live on in the artist. —Paul Klee

Like a personal myth, an image
within us. The half-hidden castle
as if petitioned into the visible:
the wavering battlements,
the evasive terrain.

Fallen from an edge of the sun,       
the aureate light.  The structure
of stone suffused.  An illusion
of perpetuity.

Beyond the insular walls,         
a geometry of shadows.
Colors of mud, dust, and scree.

Unperceived, the portending of grief.   

Unstable in the way of sentient things,
the apparatus of the castle.
Within, the singular breathing of sleep.

 

KAFKA: THE UNCOLORED WORLD     

Between you and the contiguous organisms
of castle and court, a jurisdictive distance.

Your vaporous days weighed
against the adjacent world
that forms pass through like blades.

The unspoken osmosis
that siphons the light
into the hidden.

An erasure of order.  Of the cosmos
and colors that came before. 

A landscape absent its heavens
and pigmentation.

 

TO FRANZ KAFKA

            —after Gershom Scholem

Through the pane darkly we see
the unstable alleyways and houses,
the randomness of light, antlered shadow.

Above the city, the corrosive clouds.
Below the maleficent markings:
the unlit attic, the dark-robed tribunal exhaling
into the face of the accused the stony law.

Inconstant as the tomb, this universe of yours
where alone the lion and wolf are holy.

For you, the star of salvation
stands far too high.  Were you to arrive
you would still stand in your way.

 

KAFKA’S CASTLE    

The fractional battlements and spires,
their atrophied shadows
misrecognized against the complicit horizon.

From a stone-colored cloud
over the wreckage,
the mendacious ray.  No direction shown.

A village bereft, bearing the marks
of the departed. 

Ask the Messiah who comes
and goes
which of the two of you
stands accused. 

Between what is
and is not
inside your mind:
the insidiously shifting line.

Are your knuckles not raw with the knocking?

Did you not know that on the Charles Bridge
the wind has eaten
the faces of the angels?

Absent the clarifying eye, rumors
about true things passed on by whispers
behind ambiguous hands.

 

KAFKA’S TRIAL    

Above the gray stone, no sun
unbroken.  Only the occasional threads
bright in the branches.  The fugitive congruence.

In the room painted with ash and salt
over the amorphic corridor,
the prehistoric forces of the Court:
the cage that goes in search of the bird.

Accused, you stand in the accrual of shadow.
Your thoughts move toward absolution
like small, pale moths.

The shame of this will outlive me, you say. 

The ordained blade carves a rose in your heart.

Laura Ann Reed has poems in seven anthologies, including Poetry of Presence II, and in numerous journals based in the US, the UK, Ireland, and Canada.  In Seventh Quarry (Wales), she was the featured Poet of the Month in August 2024. Her chapbook, Shadows Thrown, was published in 2023. https://lauraannreed.net/

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