Cloud of Ink

by L. S. Klatt

Overview

On the surface, L. S. Klatt’s poems are airy and humorous—with their tales of chickens wandering the highways of Ohio and Winnebago trailers rolling up to heaven and whales bumping like watermelons in a bathtub—but just under the surface they turn disconcertingly serious as they celebrate the fluent word.
 Under the heat of inquiry, under the pressure of metaphor, the poems in Cloud of Ink liquefy, bend, and serpentine as they seek sometimes a new and sometimes an ancient destination. They present the reader with existential questions as they side-wind into the barbaric; the pear is figured as a “wild boar” and the octopus is “gutted,” yet primal energies cut a pathway to the mystical and the transcendent. The poetic cosmos Klatt creates is loquacious and beautiful, strange and affirmative, but never transparent. Amid “a maelstrom of inklings,” the writer—and the audience—must puzzle out the meaning of the syllabary.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781587299711
Publisher:	University of Iowa Press
Publication date:	03/15/2011
Series:	Iowa Poetry Prize
Edition description:	1
Pages:	84
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

L. S. Klatt teaches American literature and creative writing at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. His poems have appeared in such journals as the Boston Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly, Notre Dame Review, Chicago Review, FIELD, Cincinnati Review, jubilat, Colorado Review, the Iowa Review, Eleven Eleven,and Verse. His first book, Interloper, won the Juniper Prize for Poetry.

Read an Excerpt

Cloud of Ink

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By L. S. Klatt

University of Iowa Press

Copyright © 2011 L. S. Klatt
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-58729-971-1

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Chapter One

    Aeronautics

    Whereupon you are alone
    in a cockpit, a multitude behind you sealed tight,

    & it occurs to you that you are in an updraft
    of ampersands & colophons. Very well,

    you have trimmed lassitude into a jet
    that bears you & others into a stratosphere yet to be

    graphed; the date of your death you do not know
    nor do you assume it is ascertainable forthwith

    but skyward the flyer, folded in half, of blue wove
    paper. The plane fights, aligns itself in nebula.


    More Splendid

    Picasso has never seen the earth
    from an airplane. If
    from below, Lorca
    can imagine the elderly
    Picasso as a wing-walker
    that would be faith. That
    would be a tabula rasa
    on which to describe a bowl
    of lemons. The whole world waits
    for Picasso to cube a guitar
    or pink it with shears until watermelon.
    Carrying the coffin, Picasso wishes
    that Lorca was made
    of balsa wood.


    Liquefaction

    I found an octopus in the snow.

    And not knowing what it was or why it was there, I gutted it
    as if a hunter.


    To me, up to my elbows in bladder, the ink was a surprise.

    I wore it like opera gloves in the moonlight.


    So many mistook my passion for gangrene.

    One followed me into an orchestra pit. If I could only say now
    what my arms said.


    I took up a bassoon & aimed it at a chandelier.

    As the house lights came down, the audience lost their places.


    They were swimming in a maelstrom of inklings.


    Transit of the Beautiful

    Cockroach on the lip
    of a teacup

    while the woman upstairs

    puts a bag over her head
    & gasses the house.

    In conclusion, the lights go out; the soul is denuded.

    The insect makes no attempt to be heard
    no scream

    but, antennae waving like palm fronds before the Prince
    of Peace, crawls into the cup.

    To be destroyed, to be indestructible,
    this is always the question.


    Insult Is Necessary for the Perfection of Beauty

    Heads of lavender spit at damselflies.

    This is not hate but a byword.
    As it is written ...

    The winged shall be perfumed in gardens.

    Here on the page, a bluebottle swivels,
    the fly

    a cursor that eschews lines

    & quiet feet leave sticky notes
    for a sonata.


    Emerson revised:

    wise moments are fire-
    flies that scar the countenance ever.


    Momentum

    With this thread I tie myself to the fly
    for let us share chromosomes. I also drag
    behind me an iceberg on leash & our fondness
    for consuming. When

    I leave the horizon, a pyramid is buried
    upside down between dunes. Big lake, it tastes
    like a fried egg, a blue one. One

    by one, the glaciers are grazed upon. But of
    my own effacement, I pause for a moment
    of clarity.


    Andrew Wyeth, Painter, Dies at 91

    A weathered barn on a hilltop; a nude woman
    sprawled on the slope
    below.

    A giant squid rises out of a hayfield, & the barn
    is compassed in tentacles
    then a cloud of ink.

    A man with a fountain pen in his hand
    & a pitchfork
    in his back

    walks the cow-path around the barn
    & tells the beauty
    on the hill

    to step to it. It's as if her freckled skin
    is newly charcoaled
    & the hayloft

    a smokescreen. The cows can't be heard for certain
    within the inkblot
    but deer

    creep to the edge of the field on
    delicate feet.


    The Pear as a Wild Boar

    The hunter, who spent the better part of an afternoon
    tracking spoor, now comes upon the wounded pear
    & puts fingers to neck

    &, feeling
    the pace of its breath, slits its throat.

    He dresses the slain in a field
    where the skins of others are strung from a tree
    & looks up at the tusk of a crescent moon.

    It has been a day of horrific slaughter,
    every sense sated, & what if

    to consider the roseate fruit
    he lies down with it
    as last light caresses hips & rib cage?

    The shapeliness of this final punctuation is not meant to pose
    a question, merely a respite until the hunter is overtaken
    by sleep

    & dreams again of game,
    the postulate sought, infinity.


    Husbandry

    At the University Swine Center
    the razorbacks present pristine rumps
    — they fight to be hosed.

    The horseflies too are clean
    & green glorious,
    as if the shit here
    is full of fruit & fiber.

    Thus I will have to steal it,
    secrete it,
    tell it my sad, unctuous story.


    Ohio

    I worry about your fences

    wherein thousands of propane tanks
    stand breast to breast
    like white chickens.

    Chickens
    depend on wishbones

    & their smelly parts set off alarms
    near Dayton.

    Those that range
    cross I-75 where they are struck
    now & then by Airstreams.

    So much attention here given to the tornado.

    I would like to add that when threatened
    chickens retreat into silos.

    It makes sense, if it's true, that Ohio
    is the birthplace of flight.


    Berryman in Cincinnati

    A very pleasant city except for the cicadas
    which crash-landed. After seventeen years
    underground, a horde was born
    outnumbering its predation. So, as I
    was saying, a very pleasant city in spite
    of the acoustics. Those were days
    when in all my dreaminess
    I could play no nocturne & I amplified
    underground. For I was a dead
    Berryman, & I ferried the souls
    of the dispossessed across the Ohio.
    There I met the ibis, its plumage a white
    paintbrush. And with it I erased what I
    knew was melody without hope
    of noisemaking. That was a sign,
    was it the last, that the lyre would be
    heavy metal.


    Darwin's Mouth

    And out of the mouth
    the beetle rides an acrid river
    of spittle.

    Having
    embittered the palate, it returns
    to the rainforest, a rare

    specimen with three sets of wings:
    one covers the face,
    one the feet, & with the last

    it flies. The scarab hides a lantern
    in the banana
    leaf

    where it waits considering
    suitors for its
    jade light. No matter the jaguar

    or the sloth
    the beetle recesses into sanctum
    &, all but forgotten, finds

    itself next to impossible.


    The Zoo of Reason

    Under an artificial mist
    the platypus
    exposes its private parts
    to the doubtful. Its snout
    is a sensory organ
    that wags

    &, near the ankle, a spur
    is so ready with venom
    that merely by
    watching
    I become a frogman,
    an egg-layer.

    The plasma
    of the fluorescent
    light hereafter
    floods the habitat
    where my mind's been
    known

    to black out. In
    my job as a zookeeper
    there are many eyes.
    If it were not so
    I would say
    yes to so
    few.


    Ovation

    The Oval occupies the mind; it does whatever it pleases.

    Wherefore, the Hindenburg docks with the Goodyear

    & killer whales bump like a bathtub
    full of watermelons

    & the bathyscaph nurses at the mother ship as a beehive
    at the pear tree

    & the hedgehog kisses a quail egg. Selah.


    * * *


    Alleluia. The eyes of the Oval roam to & fro across the face
    of the earth

    & rest in the feathers of the peacock

    & lie on every spreadsheet.

    Come & see the acacia leaves that applaud the great neck
    of the giraffe.

    These are what grew out of the mouth of the Oval.


    Shakedown in the Sugar Shine

    [??] & [??]
    pasted on fenders.
    Wings in the blades of windshield wipers.

    The Suburban, so adorned, sweats
    as a carriage
    of kings.

    Bees swarm the staves

    itching to eat off chrome, itching
    to glean the hood.

    Dust off the pollen, the infinitesimals,
    trick out the rig in woofers
    boom boom

    — that's enough, that's enough.

    Ditch the honey truck; wipe down
    the music.


    Recreation

    Cloud, you drift above Minnesota,

    a thunderhead in the sky unmapped
    by meteorologists.

    You who watch below

    the liquid Minnesotans
    & send your glass assassins

    to the rusty

    have also opened a Rest Area
    for Winnebagos

    which caravan into heaven.

    Cloud of our ancestors
    welcome now the Suburbans

    for they consume the golden prairie

    & they wash in the Mississippi
    as if the River of Life.


    Whippoorwill

    The Blue Ridge in West
    Virginia. Mist

    covers the whole sleepy thought of it,
    including the deer, its black lips

    sewn shut with piano wire. Now
    we have the beginning
    of a hollow

    in which a piano tuner searched
    for, but failed to find,

    the holy ghost.

    The longer mystified
    the more he was inclined

    to silence. There is a thought that one
    can hear the whippoorwill
    in the muzzle
    of a gun.

    I never believed that.


    The Calm of a Thoughtful Sentence

    When you sense a misfire in the brain
    it's wistful to seize upon a yak, neck-deep
    in the Yangtze, its oblong head serene
    as the Himalayas

    or to commandeer a kayak in the River
    that runs amber, a golden
    ox tail that switches
    only occasionally

    or, lightning bolts notwithstanding, to lasso
    the scud that blows West
    to East & East
    to West

    until settled upon the Matterhorn
    you feign an alpine meadow
    where the how now brown cow
    relaxes its insubordinate
    hindquarters.


    The Good Fight

    All the fathers gather in the back
    of the B-17 bomber. They have volunteered
    for death, but now that it's time

    to jump, they are unwilling. Thus they huddle
    in congregation, training themselves
    to cry out, which is a way to navigate when

    marooned. And that must be hell, the oblivion
    to which nothing aspires, not the Hollywood
    jumpers, not the desperate that jerk upward.

    And so maybe they fall into deep sleep, neither up
    nor down, keeping their half-lives in limbo,
    no strings attached. I am talking

    about my father who lingered seven years ago
    in hospice, a cancer patient. I wasn't there; I was
    helpless in another plane, perhaps a cross.


    Affliction

    I am painting this house with water,
    dipping my brush

    in clarity, & if I told you the house
    is an aquarium

    & if I told you the house

    is buoyant, would you see
    through it?


    * * *


    My house underwater seems misshapen

    &, given its tonnage, grotesquely
    immersed.

    Come to the window, moon
    jellyfish. Parachute

    of tentacles to outer space.


    February

    A little girl died
    & they laid her in an ambulance
    without lights or sirens
    because she was already cold.

    Some coroner, I suppose, will examine her
    & run his thumbs over shinbones.

    When I look at the moon, I see the forehead
    of a steelworker
    creased.

    It's a gibbous moon.

    In the sink, I wash a bunch of carrots
    that have iced
    in the crisper. So bright

    they look like they should never die.

    This neck of the woods, at this time
    of year, is as red as ketchup. The light
    grows longer; there are
    57 varieties.


    A Vague Field for Priestcraft

    The smudge on your forehead, I consider it a cloud over a skater
    on a frozen pond.

    In the cloud, a goose is sucked into a jet engine.

    But first the nose of the jet entered as a missile.

    And that is why, with exit wound, you speak to me of marksmen
    as if a tracer got in your head.

    I admit that I am searching for a blade
    that figures the ice. A scar
    seems a necessary evil, while the compulsory, an irritant,
    pushes the skater
    to the margins.

    So that the blade runs out of surface. Near scattershot to find
    here a boat made of cinders.


    Mercy Planet

    It snowed on Palm Sunday,
    olive branches collapsed,
    & a stink bug squared himself
    inside the windowpane
    stuck in condensation.

    Feelers looked to the corner
    where a recluse deleted an Umbrian
    rhyme;
    underside faced outward
    & became glass-
    bottomed
    if only to be looked through
    to violet.

    Hoods of the misericordia
    laid in a pile
    waiting to be used.

    Oxidized, the rood
    pierced my skull
    like a thermometer in roast beef.


    Cortona

    My halo attracts lightning
    & so I am dead

    or possibly there's a dead man
    in my mouth

    though I'm blowing, blowing
    a pigeon to life,

    & if not a pigeon
    an Etruscan named Dardano.

    My city is lit with the snow
    of his groin.


    Body Part in a Tuscan Garden

    We stumble upon a foot,
    the pedestal abandoned.

    The torso is missing
    as is the pelvis; so also the shin.

    A foot wrapped in ivy withstands,
    has been known to predict a tyrant.

    Is it happy? Does it resent?

    If a Magdalene waters the toes
    what can we surmise from stone?

    If a Bernini chisels the heel
    is there harm?

    Sunlight on footfall presumes so much.

    It says to the footloose: remember
    the lemon tree.


    Canticle : Calculus

    Sine & cosine are often invoked.

    As when a seeker, I felt for trilobites
    in a swift, dark stream.

    Anchorites that held — hold me acutely.

    Lilies buried by the bulldozer
    also fall back on their radicals.


    And Pascal, what might you say
    to mitochondria that once slept —

    you who pose in the scallop
    of the baptismal

    & still you are impressed
    by x?


    Extrapolate to the crows, the cows
    on their knees

    & you get the sense of a greater than
    less than.

    This wish for triangle.

    And there are yet more sides.


    Antediluvian

    The sun spins over the West

    a knuckleball. It will never rest,
    not in the leaves of the copper beech,

    not on the trunk which could be
    a brontosaurus leg. Wary

    is the H-Bomb; its light
    wobbles, feeling ancient. Here come

    the Giants. They are not crestfallen;
    they pitch their yawps because

    the world is swale, the wind blows, the once was
    now is, now is not. Was

    there ever a reason to think otherwise?


    Acqua Alta

    A sad iceberg & swamped Venice: a plate
    of squid ink, a granule of sugar on the lip.

    The Adriatic scribbles in the polygons.
    We tourists, too, are signatures. How

    many lions stuck on sticks & stones
    before espresso cups turn

    in their saucers at St. Mark's?

    Masons who levitate
    square, rhombus, & trapezoid: sink

    your hands into the mortar, the smalls
    of your backs.


    Burano

    Island, whose houses are chromatic, floats
    in the Adriatic, an islet

    so small it forgot how to swim.
    Imagine

    this city absorbed in lapis
    an inkblot. Say

    to the mapmakers: the polis

    justifies itself.
    Its campanile reaches for a savior, leans.


    Reading

    In the stern of the sailboat
    a god

    neither invited nor expected
    pilots

    a rudder through space.


    The sun is not an offense
    against majesty

    but when it scorches white sails
    the hull tips

    as if bearing a gold testicle.


    That is to say, the universe
    is imbalanced

    & the moon, in traffic, a whiteness.


    For day strip-searches night.

    And the orb weighted with itself
    wets itself.


    Where My Sunflower Wishes to Go

    A goldsmith hammered a sunflower
    out of recycled trinkets. It howled

    because it was tasteless, because it was
    brassy. It could not turn to the sun

    like other heliotropes. So the sun

    had pity on the yard ornament
    & melted it down with ardor.

    And the goldsmith soaked his hands
    in the liquefaction, & they hardened.

    In this condition, he discovered

    a finch laying an egg in a trash can.
    He could handle neither the bird

    nor the egg with his welded fingers.
    But the yolk beneath the blue enamel

    of the sky made him happy. It cast
    his silhouette on the sidewalk while bees

    trampled it with mellifluous feet.


    Old World Birds

    When you talk to the bee-eaters they pretend
    you are not there. You can follow them
    into Madagascar & across the Mozambique
    Channel & still not register
    an acknowledgment. This is sad because you
    mean no harm & you have taken
    great pains to mimic their trills, chuckles,
    & whistles. Just to hear Darwin
    speak of them, you know that the scythe
    of their bills is made for the erratic
    snatch of wings midflight, &, as the wings
    are indigestible, they eject them. This is
    not to say that bee-eaters sugar their songs
    with upbeats before disgorging — far
    from it. Sometimes they beat the bee
    against a branch, then croak. You are
    surprised that a diet of stingers yields a rainbow
    plumage, but, given one more reason
    to quail, you hardly blush. The mistake
    is to imagine on moonlit nights
    you are one of them.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Cloud of Ink by L. S. Klatt Copyright © 2011 by L. S. Klatt. Excerpted by permission of University of Iowa Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Aeronautics....................1
More Splendid....................2
Liquefaction....................3
Transit of the Beautiful....................4
Insult Is Necessary for the Perfection of Beauty....................5
Momentum....................6
Andrew Wyeth, Painter, Dies at 91....................7
The Pear as a Wild Boar....................8
Husbandry....................9
Ohio....................10
Berryman in Cincinnati....................11
Darwin's Mouth....................12
The Zoo of Reason....................13
Ovation....................14
Shakedown in the Sugar Shine....................15
Recreation....................16
Whippoorwill....................17
The Calm of a Thoughtful Sentence....................18
The Good Fight....................19
Affliction....................20
February....................21
A Vague Field for Priestcraft....................22
Mercy Planet....................23
Cortona....................24
Body Part in a Tuscan Garden....................25
Canticle : Calculus....................26
Antediluvian....................27
Acqua Alta....................28
Burano....................29
Reading....................30
Where My Sunflower Wishes to Go....................31
Old World Birds....................32
White Elephant....................33
Arrow....................34
Semiconductors in the Breadbasket....................35
A Sudden Unspeakable Indignation....................36
The Americans....................37
Pioneer....................38
Broadcaster....................39
The Fluid Rider....................41
The Firmament....................42
King Salmon....................43
The States of the Great Lakes....................44
J. D. Salinger, Recluse, Dies at 91....................45
Figment in Pink & Transcendental....................46
May Day....................47
Nocturnal Movements of the Porcupine....................48
Fish & Wildlife....................49
She Makes Me Lie Down....................50
The Good Guide, ca. 1310....................51
George Keats....................52
The Lily Always Hangs Its Head....................53
Liquidambar....................54
Crete....................55
Lines of Motion....................56
Chiaroscuro....................57
Audubon....................58
Heaven....................59
Frontiersman....................60
The Repository of Sacred Music....................61
A Better Mousetrap....................62
The Author....................63
For Lack of a Better Word....................64

Editorial Reviews

L. S. Klatt’s new collection creates a taxonomy of mystery, magic, surprise. Like a cloud, it floats through the reader’s mind with playful shapeliness—but like ink, it leaves a darker, and lasting, impression.”—Robert N. Casper, publisher, jubilat

" I am adrift in a burned-out canoe / without a helmsman.' If you've ever felt lik this, then L.S. Klatt's Cloud of Ink should offer you some kind of cold-in this case the right kind of cold-comfort. Klatt's poems broadcast elegiac tones and redemptive notes; their combinations underscore the conviction we know by poetry's precisions, in some places and at some times felt as hope in spite of despair."-Dara Wier, Reverse Rapture

“Swinging between the midwestern vernacular of James Wright and the vexed wistfulness of Richard Hugo, these poems are nearly unquotable, so tightly joined are they of languages variously plainspoken and wildly swooping. Klatt’s seemingly spare and diffuse lyrics artfully assemble a complex and rich vision, generous in intention, provocative in enactment, ecstatic in spirit. A wild and welcome collection of poems from an exciting and dynamic thinker.”—Kazim Ali, author, Bright Felon

From the Publisher