BLACK MARKET LIT
About Steve Klepetar.
Not a Single Star
STEVE KLEPETAR believes that he is the best-known, Shanghai-born, Jewish-American poet in all of Central Minnesota. So far this claim has not been hotly contested. The pieces included here are surrealist in nature, meditating on and playing off against familiar ideas (drinking at a sidewalk cafe, going to Hell in a handbasket) and allusions to Yeats, Van Gogh, The Unicorn Tapestries, and the old rhyme that begins "Monday's child is full of grace..."
Come, I shall lead you hollow of wind
together with my weeping stones
and drink the shadows of our meat.
Remember the city lights of home, neon
red and blue cafes, steam rising from
soup and chalk marks scored above
a glass-tinkling bar. All night bugles
open the sky in gashes of brick and steel, fingers of light and rain explode against paving stones of dusk. Who will fashion
these memories of pain or make a
translation of air? Into the marketplace
they drag the unicorn, unfurl a flag
we will not salute. We have no homeland
left, not a bridge or street, not a single star.
There’s never anyone
around when you need
a ride to Hell –
when your hand wraps
around your tumbler
and the Scotch trembles
seismically to rhythms
of your awakened blood.
When have you found
a chirographerto read the hard lines
carved deep in your bitter palms?
Every beaten car hurtling past lays
its wreathes of toxic smoke
around your frozen face – your lacerated
thumb dangles in the salty air, your feet
ache with highway grit and salt.
But who stops? Who opens a door
to your knowledge of things
unknown or tosses you bread or a waxy
crumb of cheese? He that is born on Wednesday
shall lightly learn words, that much we know,
and that Tuesday’s child shall be covetous
and perish by iron, and hardly come to his last age.