Kafka in Fenâ Fillah
BY LEYLA ÇOLPAN
Finalist for the 2020 Adroit Prize for Poetry
The crows maintain that a single crow could destroy the heavens. This is doubtlessly so, but proves nothing against heaven, for heaven… —Franza Kafka, The Zürau Aphorisms (1918)
As if Sodom could be undone
in the migration of crows. As if ash
rowed out on the little black boats
of their bodies
each October—
:: For heaven
My ghost sleeping with my lover’s
ghost. Soho sheathed in basalt. Touch-
stone. All you lovers and your little human
wings. All you sooty friends
of Lot.
For heaven :: means
Smoky-eye. Sodom, or Soho. The makeup brushes
wet with chrome and our two faces
mirrored. If my lover looks at me so
heaven machines
between us.
For heaven means :: precisely
A clink of scalpels in the music, this
too being chrome—a chorus—being
beyond our bodies in their dive
and chatter. Eyelets and a flock
of eyes.
For heaven means :: precisely
Smoked glass. A flock of eyes,
or Argus in his boa of black quills.
I watch my lover dip
into me then dip again
into the watching.
For heaven means precisely :: impossibility
As when crows make the sky their Babel,
talking backward:
each I another drop up into the mirror-
lake where I reverse myself
in you.
For heaven means precisely impossibility :: of crows
[ the glass lake
where October flies
between us on its little
black boats ]
