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thePeorian.com
WRESTLING LI PO
FOR THE REMOTE
By Kevin Stein
While I recited you, Li Po, Cops broadcast
a wife-beater’s earning his shirt’s eponymous name,
and televised badges arrived to disassociate sign
from signified as did Derrida with nightsticks.
The drama bled so American you changed
channels as the cuffs’ half moons first kissed
then swallowed the man’s bloody wrists.
You flipped our feathered page, sighing.
Somewhere on Mercy Street the woman’s halter
hardly halters what it’s meant to. Somewhere
the chapel of her body proposes its commandment,
“
Do whatever makes you less unhappy.”
Somewhere it’s plaid boxers and meth-teeth,
filmed behind a trailer’s busted screen door.
But our channel’s a sparrow perched on branch.
The remote’s not under the couch. It’s in us.
Your poems lie in my hands, lying. Why is there
nothing of An Lushan’s war hounding your heels,
nothing of dead-scalloped streets of sacked Chang’an?
Nothing of exile’s knife pressed against your gut.
Instead, you’ve taught me wu-wei, “doing nothing” –
the way a mountain floats its own cloud river,
these blossoms flute their yellow-petaled tune,
the universe unfolding its fist within us.
That’s why I repeated “somewhere” three times
in five lines to distance the daily perfidity
as you did by ignoring it – anaphora my faux Tao.
Students of Zen don’t abide boozy wifebeaters.
No, a blind eye is the remote’s remote,
as is one’s head slung upon the limned wind.
You fell drunken into a river and drowned,
trying to embrace the moon. I drowned in you.
Old master, I’m done. I’ve pulled the plug
on my dead man’s float, I’ve clicked off
the sparrow’s song. Now where’s that knife?
Where’s your chest, these eyes plucked that I may see.
Poetry
Kevin Stein has published ten books of poetry and criticism, including the
essay book Poetry’s Afterlife: Verse in the Digital Age (University of Michigan
Press, 2010). Among his recent poetry collections are Sufficiency of the Actual
(
University of Illinois Press, 2009) and American Ghost Roses (University of
Illinois, 2005) – winner of the Society of Midland Authors Poetry Award. He
teaches at Bradley University. Since 2003, he’s served as Illinois Poet Laureate.
