Eliot Cardinaux
FOR OSIP MANDELSTAM
IV
Early, we spoke
underneath
when the devil
listened
a thicket of war
in the leaning
waltz,
in a word
the body trimmed
voice by voice
twirled the branch
in a sunlit twilight
greyed into sinking.
Steal, heart-
red, emerge
another
death;
buttons slipping, wind
still billows in your coat.
THREE POEMS AFTER PAUL CELAN
​
XVI
Sky-
artifice
in jagged
greys;
nostalgia,
scouring
the resonant
rock-
known no-
threshold,
look along
the borderland:
the guestless,
heaven-known
reminder-child-
small, yet
here-again
face.
XVII
Never,
traversing your
city, I wore
​
the unwishing
cloudscowl,
snowscuffing
your master,
​
wreathing
a falsified winter,
​
one sky-
flawed snare-
roll, lift-
ing
confetti of fear
on a breath of
horsehair.
XVIII
Even if
the six-point
Eros erodes
the either-disaster compared
to the monkish
guppyleg.
Even if
your leaving-
still
somehow strands
dead shores.
Born in Dayton, Ohio in 1984 to a creative family, Eliot Cardinaux is a pianist and poet now living in Northampton, Massachusetts. Having studied jazz piano at Manhattan School of Music, as well as contemporary improvisation and poetry at the New England Conservatory, he has lived in many places and absorbed a variety of influences. He is the founder of The Bodily Press through which he has released the works of other poets, musicians, and artists, as well as several of his own chapbooks and CDs, including, most recently, the chapbooks Dissentspring, Dreadsummer, and Fallimpend, and the trio albums take me by the hand of darkness, and Magpie: Six Geet on Solid Ground. His poetry has been published in Caliban Online, Big Big Wednesday, Hollow, Bloodroot Literary Journal, Trestle Ties, and others. Cardinaux performs and records regularly around the East Coast and in Europe, with musicians such as Asger Thomsen, Mat Maneri, Flin van Hemmen, Eivind Opsvik, and Kresten Osgood. His latest solo project, Sweet Beyond Witness, is an album of solo piano compositions and spoken word with accompanying writings and film, released in August, 2018 on The Bodily Press. He is currently pursuing an MFA in poetry at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.
Photo by Peter Ganushkin