Poetry By Maxima Kahn

         Christian Collins CC




fable

if there’s a way to write about it without getting too complex, shifting a word here or there, edging around metaphors, if i could just say i and you, and mean just i and you, without going into explanations, or standings-in, but just to speak truth like a white farmhouse peeling in the sun. not to make a virtue of simplicity, more to give the self, myself, a wide pasture, like opening a corral and letting out into a sweeping field, the whole length of the afternoon, and hardly even a mountain in the distance. as if cookies were baking near an open window, like in the fables, that wholesome smell, a farmhouse window. but this time it’s for real, because i did sit there one afternoon, my car broken down, my old forest-green volvo with the one bright orange fender, on the westminster west road, coming home from cleaning houses down the road, and i waited in the kitchen of a ramshackle white farmhouse, a big kitchen just like you’d imagine, with the chipped metal enameled table. and there was a whole tray of oatmeal or maybe chocolate chip cookies cooling and more baking in the oven, and she said you’ll have to wait ‘til my husband comes in from the field, he’s almost done, she said looking out across the road, and the warm glow of the late light was filling the window and the road and the field out beyond, and i followed her eyes, and there he was atop a tractor bringing in the corn. and she just laughed when her two big rowdy boys came in, snatched cookies off the cooling rack, and while eagerly exclaiming about something, swore, and she said, not really minding, don’t swear.

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A Different Kind of Breathing

Let’s say the core of happiness within, let’s say it’s like a spinning planet. We walk and the planet spins. We sleep, eat, dream, and the planet spins. Let’s say we weep, make love, are torn by fear. The planet spins, always in its constant orbit inside the hollow of our bodies.  

One day we stumble on it, the spinning, sleeping planet. How it goes and goes, this breathing core. Let’s say we could for once hold all the sorrow and cruelty in one hand. In the other, this living planet, spinning. Like poppies growing on a mound of death. So much a part of all, they offer up orange and pink to the light without shame. 

A Tibetan monk escaped over the mountains, terror trailing him. Five out of fifty survived. In Madras, unbearably hot, filthy, covered with flies, begging for each meal. Having lost the gleaming mountains, the carved walls of the monastery. Happy. 

Not from denial nor a hard heart. I’m talking about a way of seeing. When every breath carries with it a wave of joy while the world cries at your feet. And you cry with it. Inside, the planet goes on spinning.

Let’s just say I stumble. A kind of despair gutting me. Then something lighter than wind brushes my cheek. Nothing’s changed. But now, it’s as if there are two of me. The one who’s dying goes on dying. And the one who’s living? Well, April follows March, gives way to May, even as December blankets the earth and every cell of this body shivers with cold.





​Maxima Kahn is a writer, teacher, and firekeeper. Her first full-length collection, Fierce Aria, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2020. Her work has been featured in numerous literary journals, including The Louisville Review, Wisconsin Review, Sweet, and many others, and on popular blogs, and she has twice been nominated for Best of the Net. She has taught creative writing and creative process privately since 2004 and formerly at the University of California, Davis Extension, and she is the recipient of scholarships and fellowships to the Community of Writers and the Vermont Studio Center. She is also an improvisational violinist, an award-winning composer and a dancer. MaximaKahn.com
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