FEATURED WRITER
Jason Reuven Kropsky
Captain of Sad Wandering:
In Memory of Paul Celan
(1920-1970)
You dragged your foot along for so long.
Bandaged your homeless wound.
Wandered from place to place with sour cheese.
Above your top lip, below your nose.
Sniffed acrid pockmarked holes.
At Gustave Eiffel’s ochre brown Tower,
You let out the divine, if muted howl.
Goose stepping down the Chantes delysees.
Children of Woton made their way.
A flock of loons lifted off a spire,
Circling until dizzy,
Paul fell to weep.
For all the sins of Margarette’s misdeeds.
You are the tattoo that shines from the beacon along the River Seine,
Star of David illuminating the cobalt sky,
Currency, flag, god and tribe.
You tear from contempt worrisome indiscretion.
Between ego of past and pride of future
Humility left vacant for the taking.
What is it worth for the excommunicated
to buy back all these disgraces?
To recycle a thousand, even a million faces?
At the end of the road is a depeneur.
A baguette, a set of road maps,
I calculate all the ways you slip from grace,
I drink the black milk of morning,
I bless you for never visiting Heidegger again.
Captain of sad wanderings.
Last taste of the coffee pip inside the purple fruit.
Muddy like the unforgiving bog.
Of cobalt sea,
You fall into the unfurling Seine,
Paris dawn.
Go Play, Play Oscar
We have just completed our walk in
the chickadee afternoon
Glistening cedar brown fur
dashing through
tumor-plated kitchen.
Bound for the
whirling,
orange disk-dappled porch.
Again, he is off,
Leaping into
four-pawed air
With a dachshund’s
fine-toothed
muzzle.
Jabbing into the deep divineless hole of ontological relativism.
If pretending that what we say is indeed logically correct.
As knowing that the sun may not come back tomorrow.
Or I may not be able to find the pen with the felt-tipped knob in my favorite desk drawer,
To chronicle the in-between, to admit that there is no proof.
Have you ever met a truly objective man?
Where does he sleep?
And does he shit?
Does he believe in rendering reason and God in a single breath?
Does he meditate on mollusks (not molachs) or melachs for that matter,
Having read too much Schopenhauer,
Cursing the classical muse?
I go, and so does Oscar,
like biblically-trained muts,
which we are,
will always be.
We go
to the depths: he
scatters the soil of
Martha’s backyard with
dagger claws,
mischievous
crinkle.
Ripened magnolia petals fall
again
after a second blooming.
I pick up the bright pink flower
almost hardened,
watch my boy tussle,
with a stick he has found in
the empty fire pit.
Between panting breath of
avid molars,
Oscar chews the loamy bark.
Jason Reuven Kropsky published the monograph “Between Politics and Morality: Hans Kelsen’s Contributions to the Changing Notion of International Criminal Responsibility” in 2019. His recent lecture series, “The Death of Socrates and the Birth of Political Philosophy,” created for the rural communities of southwest Oregon, interrogated the law’s limits and the possibility of civil disobedience in an America fractured. His essays and poetry have been published The Daring, and he remains a frequent contributor to WordShedNYC. Kropsky lives in Seattle, Washington.
