Busker: (Matthew 25:1–13)

Abstract

Busker(Matthew 25:1–13) Karl Kirchwey (bio) A young woman in a short black dress is handling fire in front of a crowd. Above her, on the church façade, there are ten robed female figures with lamps. Two of the lamps have gone out, during the past nine hundred years, or were never lit, but no one seems to notice, being, as they are, intent on the two paths of lighter fluid (it must be) she lays across the fan of basalt cobbles, then stepping down into the furrow of her own lurid martyrdom, she takes up lit and whirls round and round her head in roaring orbits, till she seems spitted on the axis of her own movement, her fingers having become all torches which she blows out neatly and singly. There is a smudge across her thigh. She cracks a whip of flame till it goes narrow, both fed by the sweating air and stifled by it, then goes thick, amid the sulky pinions of smoke and yellow particles of granular fire. [End Page 78] One midnight she went out to look for oil. It was dark and she heard no clamor. Finding the bridegroom had closed the door, she simply made her own festival. She does not sleep; she is not foolish, here where the gold tympanum flickers high above her opened palm: and the crowd will ebb only at her wish. [End Page 79] Karl Kirchwey Karl Kirchwey’s sixth book of poems Mount Lebanon (Marion Wood Books / Putnam’s) appeared in Spring 2011, as did his translation of Paul Verlaine’s first book as Poems Under Saturn (Princeton University Press). Professor of the Arts at Bryn Mawr College, he is serving as Andrew Heiskell Arts Director at the American Academy in Rome from 2010–2013. Copyright © 2012 Johns Hopkins University Press