Tim Kahl [http://www.timkahl.com] is the author of Possessing Yourself (CW Books, 2009), The Century of Travel (CW Books, 2012) and The String of Islands (Dink, 2015). His work has been published in Prairie Schooner, Drunken Boat, Mad Hatters' Review, Indiana Review, Metazen, Ninth Letter, Sein und Werden, Notre Dame Review, The Really System, Konundrum Engine Literary Magazine, The Journal, The Volta, Parthenon West Review, Caliban and many other journals in the U.S. He is also editor of Clade Song [http://www.cladesong.com]. He is the vice president and events coordinator of The Sacramento Poetry Center. He also has a public installation in Sacramento {In Scarcity We Bare The Teeth}. He plays flutes, guitars, ukuleles, charangos and cavaquinhos. He currently teaches at California State University, Sacramento, where he sings lieder while walking on campus between classes.
Listen to Tim read his work right here!
3 Poems by Tim Kahl
Fartlek
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We trained to attack hills, in formation
and firing in a spurt of fury to the top.
We knew a low gear had to kick in
if we could only attend to the will amid
the traffic of the body's insubordination.
So we learned to tame the pain by bursting
into sprinter mode — each time a longer
distance. We prepared to sustain.
It was like paying attention to
a worthy task no one has time for anymore.
Now everything is set in motion, and all you
have to do is react, rehash the plot synopsis
set in place by emotion. All the time
you are searching and orienting and
determining if you should take flight
like an animal stunned by the sight of
large words on a billboard. You want to
flee into the past when the triggers would
click and there would be a flash of intensity
up the hill, a focus on the hardest part of
the day when you are alone in that moment
not submitting to fitting in, not submitting to
the great virtue of mediocrity. It is then
you understand what passion is
as you recalculate your chance of getting to it,
tensing, tensing before the starter gun
goes off for the most important race of your life.
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As Carbon Aspired
As carbon aspired to be diamond, so did men aspire to become part of the zeitgeist. It was a very optimistic time. Later, experiments involving corpses saw them clearly reaching out to consciousness though no one knew how it began. The brain was implicated with all its secretions of moral thought. But it also served to interrogate nature. Was it not so tangled up in concepts just the night before when it sought to reattach a leaf? It had a dream of cosmological collapse, of fluxions and calculus in the new world at its feet. Miracles of wonder could be seen in the deep time of the earth that mirrored the mechanism of the heavens. The planting of a star is one of those unhallowed acts that leads to further discussion in the communities that frame the human. The strands of all the scientific isms unwind, but the influence of matter on mind will be forever hid. Art asserts the whole circle — a smoother pebble and prettier shell than ordinary . . . that leads to obsession.
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The First White Hint
The nation was not halfhearted at the sight of the wildfire's rebellion and the bullying ways of imports that taunted the borders into buckling. The flag did not perform a drama at the shady lookout in the safer brush. It was not after a confession from a religious order or a sea of tents in the open. It did not punish the unidentified or the overdosers. It sent in fingers to massage the backs of all parties on the mountaintops and in the valleys, in the stream of ceremony at the tribunals. It monitored the displaced and revealed the syndicates of ammunition in the degraded era of tourism. It held back the turbid waters from the ruin where the first white hint of future work awaits.
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