The Carried Quality
by David Keplinger

AS HIS DEATH day approaches, on the Gregorian calendar, I hear my father’s voice weeks beforehand. It carries on a wave, and very loudly, until it meets me at the instant of his final breath in March. But my mother’s death day, death hour, death moment, falls on the Julian calendar. It requires such minute calculations, I can never get this right. It is likely to pass while I am walking early morning in the sunshine, the very moment that a spider, the tiniest axe, swishes in front of my face.

IN TRNKY’S SHORT FILM Hand (1965), the hand offers the puppet money to sculpt it a likeness, an upraised hand, but the puppet refuses, and the hand begins to visit with technology, telephones and televisions, to carry its message, but the puppet refuses, and then the hand changes its glove from something white and birdlike, twittering, to something gray, cement-colored, and begins to point straight down, but the puppet refuses, so the puppet is exhausted by the time it dies of a heart condition, like Trnky himself, and is lain in a cabinet for books while the hand, devotedly, officiates.

PARTICULATE THINGS can be carried, somewhat randomly, on waves. The radio was a very good one and could pick up signals from far away. I was in the cornfields of Pennsylvania where the station identifications began with “W.” Later I found I was getting stations west, where the call letters use a “K.” I would lie in his bed with the lights out, listening to the radio, imagining the Pacific Ocean. After a while, it started to pick up conversations. A couple arguing about something in Russian. I heard some mention of Vladivostok. There were places, too, but where or when they were, I never knew. A hushed voice, in a temple. A woman sipping a drink with a jet engine roaring in the background. Then, it had circumnavigated so far west, it came round to my own house again: the voices of my parents in the next room. Or just a stone outside, doing nothing in a rainstorm.

I ALWAYS set out for Lima with the Bible of Theodore Roosevelt. There is a wrestling match always when we cross the equator, and the two opponents are, always, both winning. “Then I will pour out my thoughts to you, I will make known to you my teachings,” I read out loud from the book, and I am made to understand that that’s what is happening here in the wrestling match. From the portholes of the ship, waves pour forth. Then, as always, we’re completely under water. How is Lima still so far away? How are we, always, only halfway there?

WHAT NIGHT did the Jazz Age apex; break through ionosphere; what club; what hour; what set; what song. Ortlieb’s, Vanguard, Blackhawk, Blue Note. Savoy, Preservation Hall. Howard Theater, Lincoln Theater, Club DeLisa, Cadillac Bob’s. When Coltrane felt the flight in powers, he escaped the pull of the lymph nodes and liver. Bemsha Swing was bent inside him by acceleration, like light at certain speeds. No one could keep up with the musical changes anymore. But the apex of the jazz age was much earlier. In Montgomery a man named Herman Poole, in 1936, claims to be carried to Saturn, saying later, “My whole body changed into something else... I could see through myself. And I went up....” It happened so fast, the details have been lost to distortion and vagueness, like all things when described as they are.

EVERYTHING DECAYS and falls away, and at exactly the same pace. It’s all so, I’d say sexual, but this is less about desire than its opposite. Still, to watch it from the microscopic level, you’d think you’re being tempted, flirted with—the atom unfastened from molecule, brass slowly pried through a buttonhole.

DAVID KEPLINGER is the author of six books, most recently The Long Answer: Selected and New Poems (2020) and Another City (2018), which was awarded the 2019 UNT Rilke Prize for a mid-career poet. He has also published several books in translation from the Danish and the German.

The Carried Quality by David Keplinger

The Carried Quality
by David Keplinger