“The Expedition” (from The Frequency of Whispers)

by Ben Koch

Painting © Kevin Lewis Fougerousse

In every village of his life he was the white

demon, even friends pressing him with spear-like shards,

cutting shanks of memory’s glass walls at certain veins.

 

Many expeditions end in fever, lightly

heeded last utterances with a child’s bursting

look across the face,

 

Disintegrating stories leave spaces where light

soaks through to clean cancers from the eyes, old burdens

like the body, having a name, no longer hold.

 

White buzzing circularly opens the chest of

space treasures from the mouth, hearty laughs, rumble bells

of bliss shining sweetness of things in rainbow echo.

 

The natives closed in on his spatter of phonemes;

the sane raised weapons in case he spoke heresies:

“There are things flashing so quickly you don’t believe,

There are things decaying so slowly you do, that’s

 

the problem.”

This poem appears in The Frequency of Whispers,

a published collection of Ben Koch’s poetry.