Tito Kohout - Three Poems

Icarus

Icarus flutters and falls to the waves
which embrace him and rock him to sleep in their hold
but never will honor his dark unmarked grave.

His children, unborn, would prepare him a cave
in a mountain's dark heart where the shadows are cold.
Instead now he flutters and falls to the waves.

With wings on his arms, helpless Daedalus raves
at the sun, which ignores him, and sinks into gold:
to lie like his son in a dark unmarked grave.

He rues his hands' work, unable to save
his one shining son, so young and so bold,
who's fluttering, faltering into the waves,

and imagines those children the son never gave
to his father, who flies on alone to grow old,
and always will honor the dark unmarked grave,

not knowing the dive of the foolish and brave
will plummet through time, generations untold,
as Icarus flutters and falls to the waves,
which never will honor his dark unmarked grave.



The Moon

I'm low and gold in a thick sky
that now diminishes my luster. I
can't see you through polluted air,
a barrier too firm for hope or prayer
to breach. Remember when you said
that I'm the rind of some round fruit that's dead,
the promise of its circular
perfection, of its bloom deferred?
It could be that I'll never wax
again. It could be that these changing tacks
will bear me off into the night
on unknown winds controlled by darkness' might.
Then I'll wane, concave, until I've gone
away to where discarded gods, now wan
and feeble, lie in fitful dreams,
'til like the kraken, they arise in screams
to smash the earth, to make the noon
so black and starless that there's only moon.



Idyll

When the sky's cerulean uniformity
pales only where it kisses
a grayly permeable horizon,

when the crispness of skin freshly scrubbed
in limpid rivulets trickling down over limestone beds
from the frigid mountains' shoulders is
the only smell in predatory nostrils,

when even the breeze rattling
the nervous leaves of the crepe myrtles
and junipers on ridges
or in creekbeds below waits
with bated breath and the silence grows so absolute
that the ears fill themselves
with tinnitus to know
they're not yet deaf,

does this mean you love me?



Tito Kohout is an Austin native and University of Texas graduate. He works as a solar installer.