“You Will Know Yourself"
You will know yourself
by remembering the clouded canvases of old dreams
on a grim day when you walk
with your eyes open.
What counts in memory
is the clean gift of evoking dreams.
Antonio Machado
John Louis Krug received his MFA in creative writing from The New School University. He was awarded the President’s Merit Scholarship for his MFA degree program. As an undergraduate at The New School he was accepted into the Riggio Honors Program, Writing and Democracy. While completing his BA he represented The New School in the Glascock Intercollegiate Poetry Competition at Mount Holyoke College. John Louis Krug lives and writes in New York City and is currently working on a collection of new poems.
Selected Poems
Between Parsley and Peppers
The premature death
of mother age ninety-six
she sitting—waiting
grocery last list in hand
her perseverance punctured
Half a country east
in Whole Foods holding a list
the call came—mom di—
Hi sweetie what—mom died—mom
the list flattens to the floor
Between how and where
between parsley and peppers
my sister’s voice wilts
gasping for air hazed by tears
between curbed moans I dissolved
I left my blurred self
tunneled back to years of partings
watched myself asking
the same mum question again and again
Is this the last—the last time
As I turn to leave
my forever mom at her door
tears in her crisp eyes
she hugs me tight with her faded
farm girl strength and lets me go
Descendent of Thieves
It is spring on Mulberry Street
The constant clamor of the crowd
Piles up to the window—steals the
Soft longing from the doves.
Across the street a throng blocks the walk
A guide cashing in—the curiosity of crimes
Committed by a man in a slick suit with
Slick hair decades ago, his sordid legacy.
Annual tests come back broken—X-rays
Obscured by suspicion, replaced by sharper
Eyed magic of noisy tunnels, oscillating screens
Biopsies absconding with future intensions.
Thieves before us, thieves after us, thieves
Amongst us always—your hearts will be
Embezzled, bodies marauded, futures
Fractured, resilience seized.
The old cathedral pauses, catches its breath
Between Easter masses, its broken bell silent—
Call and release stolen by the pickpocket
Time, older brother to the two crossed men.
In The Hour of Not Knowing
In the hour of not knowing
I saw you vanish onto the plains of Willa.
The morning lark rises into the blue air-river.
A simple day with less pain, pain that history holds dear.
In the hour of not knowing
I saw you tumble onto the thistles of Hadji Murád.
Del Sarto’s line declines softly upon your prairie province.
The morning dew magnifies the wild sweet clover.
In the hour of not knowing
I saw you spread gesso onto the known and figured.
The pentimento plains convict the memory of the hand.
The mourning dove of the city sill delivers grace into the absent silence.
In the hour of not knowing
I saw you illuminate the page with promise through tribulation.
The frost of late October fields veils a capricious daemon.
The morning doorsien dissolves as a life revealed.
Hudson Valley Line
Going north on the train he
looked west through the window.
Dioramas passed by—ancient mountains
turned to broken hills and shallow
valleys that survive without the
welfare of shade. He told himself to
leave the blunted peaks alone.
They had no pretense to grandeur,
couldn’t help that folk called them
mountains. They had turned to heaps that
shrank from the river’s reflection and
crumbled in slow tempo to rusted banks.
Unraveled mountains slumped into the
Hudson. Those hills checked his ghosted
vision of high plains and Bitterroot summits,
geologies that gutted him with joy, a
wound he preserved since the days when
spawning salmon outweighed his possibilities.
With unconscious grace, a fawn of a woman
slipped in, settled across into the sun field.
He turned from the hard-pressed hills to the
luminosity of her face as knees grazed.
She looked beyond with a cracked grin.
He folded fifty years back to the Front Range.
Mass
My family’s mass was without place or utterance,
without acknowledgment, perhaps without sin.
That is to say, marginalized by the day to day to day.
Our confessions, our prayers were solitary pleadings.
We never prayed for some body, some place, some pain.
Our reverie of religion held no teachable moments.
And yet—on May 4, 1970, I screamed a prayer for four
dead in Ohio. Children extinguished by feral children.
Massacre at Kent State, ordained by no one.
Now, mass shootings dissolve like
communion hosts on the tongue,
hard to swallow, soon forgotten.
Lilacs
Startled in his tears—
he was ambushed by lilacs.
Their perfume devoured time
erased the years.
He was ambushed by lilacs
on the corner of Mulberry and Prince.
Erased of years,
he flew home.
On the corner of Mulberry and Prince
—no, the corner at grandma’s house,
he flew home.
He laughed and dared the bees on the bush.
Yes, the corner at grandma’s house—
future was nowhere, only the lush of now.
He laughed and dared the bees on the bush.
The bees bowed to the blue.
Future was nowhere, only the lush of now.
His unpierced heart raced without fear.
The bees bowed to the perfume of the blue
he inhaled the fragrance of wonder.
The cornered man recalled the wondrous boy.
Startled in his tears—
he closed his blurred eyes as he breathed in lilacs,
their perfume devoured time.
Territory of Tribulation
Somewhere there is the demarcation
It must be different for everyone
Mystified as to the trajectory of our arrival
Some are denied the odyssey
But mostly we reach the laden land rubbed
Smooth as creek stones or gnarled as schist
Afflictions assail this margined territory
Questions never addressed
Grit in the oyster without a pearl
Pain becomes lingua franca
Caution dimples exuberance
Histories recede or flame
Conversations become one-sided
And yet sporadic wonderments appear
When walking our uncharted province
We may hear the warble of a lark or
See the crinkled eyes of knowing
In our disquiet we may say Yes
