Poetry by David P. Kozinski

       Andrew Filer CC



My Theory of Relativity

“I look at maps of Mirny Mine. / They blur and sink away in salt water…
I have work in an hour / and a hole in the ground /
large enough to be seen from space”
                -Elizabeth Leo

This is about the kindness
of a dog and how a human should be,
a little about cruelty,
but mostly about scale    – how vast
it all appears; the indifference
of the bluest fields
and the nearest, newest moon.

Friends, when I say this is about
I mean history; the day and night, sleep
and travel, tenderness and the grinder.
In another hour the sands might still,
the glass stopper itself; hands
gesture to nothing

but nothing unstopped stays the same.
The silo empties as regularly
as a lab rat’s feeder.
Whatever first lifts us up
from then on pulls down – the perpetual
drizzle, the unsolvable
argument of a trench seen from space
and the chasm so deep under water
where every story runs in its own time.

​


Day at a Standstill

Looking down and out
the window as someone rocks
back and forth on the sidewalk
        feet in the street
over a lost limb, the collapse
of magic in the non-shape
of a discarded shoe.

There is a beached whale
in every poem and no excuse
as worn as grief or jealousy
dripping from the clouds
         an eye
for an I.

Here is a pulse
like rocking back and forth
over a lost shape
        a tugboat horn
on the river at three a.m.

Here is the prosecution of justice
in a long-awaited eclipse.
We hurry across the sand
to a safe house at sundown
find our way down
a wrong but graver path.

​

David P. Kozinski received the 2018 Established Professional Poetry Fellowship from the Delaware Division of the Arts. His first full-length book of poems, Tripping Over Memorial Day was published by Kelsay Books in 2017. He received the Dogfish Head Poetry Prize, which included publication of his chapbook, Loopholes (Broadkill Press). Kozinski was named 2018 Mentor of the Year by Expressive Path, a non-profit that facilitates youth participation in the arts. He serves on the Boards of the Manayunk-Roxborough Art Center and the Philadelphia Writers’ Conference and is Art Editor of the Schuylkill Valley Journal.

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