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 ]