~ Delta Poetry Review ~

Kenneth Lynn Anderson

Anne Lee

                        A little more than a year after she was buried alive,

                        her youngest son, Robert E., was born.

My illness played with me

like a doll, my arm posed

the way an oil painting fixes a pose.

A hypnotist must have put me in a trance.

Then I floated magically on air

— or was it my soul? —

a starched ghost, my pulse farther apart

than taking it. I was a living coffin of myself.

The sighing sea that had borne me away

now washed me ashore,

each wave, each breath, each whispered brush

against the lid’s placental lining,

the cool caress of the satin pillowcase.

How long had I slept, a century, a night?

And was this narrow bedroom all?

Was all I had to do— call or just hold still

and let the numbness, like the laudanum, take?

The death, though premature, would live.

By then, I knew what solemn silence meant

and every little mystery of blind— resurrected

to bear a general, like a Chinese nesting box.

Salt Domes

                         Some of the world’s largest salt domes

                         are located in Southern Louisiana.

I visited the college to kill some time,

remembered how I’d forgotten who I was—

the young amnesiac who meant to study loss,

for years a drifting exile from myself.

And who could love who did not know himself?

I felt as if, on campus, I were walking on the gap

between the alias and the name,

the stranger and the friend,

the face and the reverse image,

the time I learned all over who I was.

Then the ground caved in, and I fell into dark.

Where I grew up, there is no solid ground.

Callanwolde Fine Arts Center

Like a lovesick ghost,

I haunted the hushed grounds, piqued

by a place

where a man

of substance

had lived. The shattered greenhouse was sinking

into a sea

of luxuriant weeds, the ribs transfigured

by the moon

to the picked-clean bones

of a giant dinosaur. Then I paused

in a glade, picturing students dabbing easels

in summer sun.

Inside, beyond the portico’s Tudor arches,

a poet declaimed

to rows fanning drowsily. Then my turn came,

and from the lectern, I saw, surprised, the elegant symmetry

of things, as if I had aligned

with some cosmic syzygy. My line

of sight

bisected the auspicious room, the starlit courtyard,

the local Pierian spring

the fountain streamed, and I aspired

to the water’s spirited flow—

its quick, pellucid luminosity. The way

a vague presence or lamented hope appears, at last

I came

to life.

Ken Anderson was a finalist in the 2021 Saints and Sinners poetry contest. His novel Sea Change: An Example of the Pleasure Principle was a finalist for the 2012 Ferro-Grumley Award and an Independent Publisher Editor’s Choice. His novel Someone Bought the House on the Island was a finalist in the Independent Publisher Book Awards. A stage adaptation won the Saints and Sinners Playwriting Contest and premiered on May, 2, 2008, at the Marigny Theater in New Orleans. Email: villafelice@comcast.net