Kristen Henderson Quotes

Through a trick lighting technique
the skyline was made and faded
with the care of a pointillist -
maybe aiding us to think nothing was
missing. We traded verbs

about what was happening
in the metropolis, realizing,
in the scorched plum of dusk,
actual human infinity was occurring
on an island before us....

There's a pressure at all hours of the day only a poem can assuage.

There used to be trees in the untended park below the old married couple of windows in my living room.

I dream
for an absentee and oft maligned
device - the accident-maker,
the soul-taker, my camera;
its factory guaranteed
third eye, without which I am duly dim
and memory denied. No pictures
for my contrived Arbus to declare,
excepting some stitch of Sexton
manages these sentences
of despair.

You think it's a game?
Unintelligible? Ha!
Envision no spoons.

This is serious.
It is a matter of joy
versus emptiness.

...you hold a poem
that functions half as personal
note and half as telescope
to the heights
awaiting us all.

there's no way I can sleep in any position with so much still unwritten about the glory of basements, where,
with all the promise in crock pot boxes, small animals go to die, piles of laundry hide the machines, rusted tools fall into other rusted tools giving way to unsung sculpture, soiled playing cards and unmatched socks strewn atop a punched-out screen door make a shaggy parquet; and a famished, leggy fluorescent tube barely winks on the entire scene.

A giant motherboard of geese,
unruffled by the state
police, swarmed in unison,
in harmony...

Once lively peonies now
wind-weary, and ragged
at the edges, hang their heavy
crowns; rain on their backs,
one final act, before
detaching from the stem
and falling down.

Sure, I watched the workmen come and lower large pieces of rotten sheetrock and lift new clean panels on a pulley
from that same window months ago, and I could have written then, but I must have sensed her coming, the smoker, so I waited.

Up past the old lime kiln
built into the side of a hill
we take a hard right at a clearing
lined by brittle apple trees
still willing to bear fruit.

I snap sticks beneath my feet
and steal pictures of the view
while you reach for something
sweet, as much as it bows
to you.

Such is a community
of inviolable immunity, protected
from tampering or harpooning
mutiny. Every better thinker's impulse
to shrink us (at the shoreline from our
lifeblood's deep pulse) uses disparaging
scrutiny to sink us.

In history, the bleeding
from arbitrary beatings, forced
breedings, and choked-heat
breathing could almost be withstood
by soul-feeding songs sung,
or listlessly hummed
just to go on.

Oblong stones sink
slow and sideways. Shaped
by the weight of waves,
dutifully vibrating nature's
lunar-bound graces,
they wash ashore only for
closed palms to forsake them.
The cheerful will
cherish them, place them
on windowsills, or on graves.

He utilizes
form for a striking lecture;
young poets shiver

inexperience,
but thaw over their own work,
fertilize magic.

I tell you once and for all -
in front of the angel pictures
on the wall, that I am not a host
to load-bearing ghosts or heady
entities, and if I was ever holy, I have fallen far
into the dense atmosphere of the living.

Good Poem

Sit,
lay down,
roll over,
here's
your treat.

If in poetry court she was called
to testify on matters where
I was condemned to imprisonment: parking my ego
at a broken meter, line violations, forced rhyme,
dealing stanzaics to children, shooting
off my mouth, getting cute, for even this
latest attempt at verse, she would tell the whole truth,
she would admit from the pit
of her unsung brilliance,
from all of the paintings and poems
she herself has been making
and storing in the vast empire of her
singing soul, your Honor, my daughter is guilty
of plagiarizing my cells.

Dear Anonymous, I've got a secret I know you can keep it because you don't really exist....This is what shapes you, this is what makes you
as authentic as you are
fake.

I like watching
from inside, as if locked away
and stealing the distinct pleasure
of a high school marching band drum section's
pure perfection. How stoically they play
in the exhaust of a fire engine's wake.

Time's relativity
is considered and abandoned,
for the more revelatory
experiences of starlight
in strands, and pearly
floors that span as far as
absolute compassion...

Once, I took the penny whistle
you gave me and discovered a spot
by the roaring falls where I could play
as loud as I wanted.
I lay in the bifurcated trunk
of a low-slung birch tree. The sun peeked
through applauding leaves, high overhead.

Editors keep pushing
deadline strain while people sleep
on benches and subway grates;
a welter weight boxer dances
on the platform at 125th Street
station, commuters look unfazed...

Even the bees I'd swear were sent to protect us in the delicate business of hives and honey are stung to silence by the news that something winged has lost its flight.

And the sculptors will shape the soil for the writers to stretch the seeds
for the patient painters who sketch the petals they will shade in alabaster and gold. Their sweat is the rain. Maybe the jazzman will send us a rose.

I wonder what became of you, your Johnny
Rotten skin, no Emerald City eyes.
You'd have been a beauty if you let inferiority
steam your glasses with its candor, sans laughter.

...we're not even really hiking,
more like meandering in cinematic light.

Think of the Christmas present
of gashes you opened when, in an attempt
to be Superman, you slid in stocking feet
on a slippery wood floor and crashed
half way through a window. Hopes
of heroism dashed on the heels
of no clear sighting of Santa.

what if there was an uncanny moment when all the birds were grounded from Cape Town to Juneau, and everywhere between--all feathers frozen in a universal stutter, so quick as to make a snail of light, and even Stephen Hawking's mind would miss it?