The Skin of Meaning

Keith Flynn

• Publisher: Red Hen Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780375711763
• eBook ISBN:
  9781597098434
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

The Skin of Meaning is award-winning poet Keith Flynn’s sixth and most wide-ranging collection, seeking to find the tangible analogs and visceral meanings hidden behind the daily bombardment of digital information and hoping to restore the mystery in our involvement with language. From the etymologies of pop culture, history, astronomy, and rock and roll, these poems fan out into a bold multiplicity of voices and techniques. Flynn’s work illustrates the meaning that is also created through tense collisions and is populated with figures in resistance to the status quo, a gathering as varied as Caravaggio, Nina Simone, Gaudí, Villon, Wonder Woman, and Manolete. The final section examines America’s fascination with violence and death, revealing that “a human being in love with mystery is never finished.” This collection constantly challenges our assumptions about the world we think we see and is teeming with evidence of another invisible world bristling like an underground river beneath our feet.

NECROLOGIES

“SNOW IS GHOSTLY . . .”

Snow is ghostly.

Loosed by the certainty of its dominion

over the living,

as its baby traps fall in sheer numbers,

a brilliant

silence ensues, and the burrow of its cover

thickens and

glistens, as all stop purely to worship

its great weight

and myriad strategies for halting

the traffic,

upending the banker and beggar

alike, bending

the haughty oak and snapping its

branches, tacking

the planes to the ground. Happy

on its throne,

the white brows unfurrow and the

hair comes down.

A cold wind holds us fast in the

bright collision.

WHEN YOU GO TO GROUND

in memory of The Genie

It’s the oddball you got to watch.

A platypus is evidence that God

smokes pot, said Robin Williams,

that poor supersonic clown, but

a duck-billed platypus is armed

with venomous spurs on its

paddling back flippers, and will

sink them into its enemy’s deepest

epidermis and leave a hollowed

carbuncle full of boiling poison.

Its aftermath makes a mamba bite

look like a bee sting, and then the

clown, that is you, says, with the

belt tightening around your neck,

I went for this serene evening dip,

and all seemed calm, until I got

killed by a platypus pitching southpaw,

and there he goes, swimming

sweetly off to join his ersatz family,

those zany evolutionary mistakes,

chirping in code, and splitting up the

long night’s ration of crawdads,

gathered round the tiny dining table,

safely away from human pesticides,

spry crocodile snouts, and unseen hawk

talons, tucked all together in some

warm dark welcoming hole called home.

THOUGHTS ON EASTER
WHILE DIGGING A GRAVE

Once there were so many buffalo rumbling

on the Great Plains, they darkened the landscape

like a storm, so many that trains full of men,

armed with carbines, would fly through the West

shooting the animals dead, stopping only long

enough to load up the skins, boxcar after boxcar

of bloody fun, leaving behind pyramids of skulls

at every station.

Fully loaded, lovely, oblivious

and muscular, three neighbor boys, with skull

plates thin as a dime, and the Southern sun settled

hissing in the bog behind their eyes, have tacked

sixteen new raccoon skins to their leaning barn

wall this Spring. At 4:00 am, with cats afuzz in the

walls, they tree a young coon one hundred feet

from our bedroom window, and shake him out

to the dogs.

With shards of the sun still plaguing

my sleepy eyes, I see in first light that the dogs

have done their best and still the animal offered

to them is moving inside his radiant skin. Too

stunned to focus down the geometry of my rifle’s

sight, I miss everything and then gather my wits

to commit to the deed and slowly squeeze the

easy trigger.

Pontius, prone to murder, was not

comfortable as a killer in the public eye, washed

his hands of all complicity in an act of political

theater, but still stacked another skul...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• Dedication
• Contents
• Etymologies
• Dichotomies
• Necrologies
• Biographical Note
• Backcover