Trevor Ketner

Window Cento


There was too much carpeting in the house but the windows upstairs were left open except on the very coldest wettest days. Why is there a difference between one window and another, why is there a difference, because the curtain is shorter. I made curtains out of colored burlap from Sears, hung them at the four windows of the green apartment. There is the thousand-windowed dance hall. One could see why they didn’t want windows after awhile. Through the poet’s window the house converses about immensity with the world. What then is a window. People are windows, lenses that focus emotion the way a magnifying glass focuses light, and the bright points burst into flame, from morning to memory. Now through lace curtains I can see the huge Wolf Moon going down, and soon the sky will lighten, turning first gray, then pink, then blue. . . . We had to wash the windows in order to see them. Windows here are small and I cannot see myself in them. The leaves outside the window tricked the eye, demanding that one see them, focus on them, making it impossible to look past them, and though holes were opened through the foliage, they were as useless as portholes underwater looking into a dark sea, which only reflect the room one seeks to look out from. I fled from the great army of windows, where not a single person has the time to watch a cloud or converse with one of those delicate breezes stubbornly sent by the unanswered sea. There is no one at home but me—and I’m not at home; I’m up here on the hill, looking at the dark windows below. Oh window muffled on the outside, oh, doors carefully closed; customs that have come down from times long past, transmitted, verified, never entirely understood. Curtains lift and fall, like the chest of someone sleeping. No longer does tower battle cloud, no longer do swarms of windows devour more than half the night.
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Sources: Materials from Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (Beacon Press, 1994), Federico García Lorca’s Poet in New York: Bilingual Edition (FSG Classics, 2013), Melody S. Gee’s Each Crumbling House (Perugia Press, 2010), Mark Irwin’s Large White House Speaking (New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2013, , Jane Kenyon’s Collected Poems (Graywolf Press, 2007), Dawn Lundy Martin’s Life in a Box is a Pretty Life (Nightboat Books, 2014), Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons: Centennial Edition (City Lights Publishers, 2014), with lines from Rilke and Francoise Minkowska as quoted by Bachelard.

Silent Cento


Let’s not have any noise in this room, except the sound of a voice reading a poem. The overtones are a denser shadow in the room characterized by its habitual readiness, a form of charged waiting, a perpetual attendance, of which I was thinking when I began the paragraph, “So much of childhood is spent in a manner of waiting.” Oh silence in the stairwell, silence in the adjoining rooms, silence up there, on the ceiling. Prepare your skeleton for the air. We are hypnotized by solitude. The uncommon run of keeping oneself to oneself. We walk along the hard crest of the snowdrift toward my white, mysterious house, both of us so quiet, keeping the silence as we go along. We don’t bother finding shelter in each other; we are preparing to be alone again. I have been spoiled with privacy, permitted the luxury of solitude. There are more places not empty. The function of inhabiting constitutes the link between full and empty. What matters is this: emptied space. Lonely world. River’s mouth. Learning to listen, that is taught not to talk. Then the great stream of simple humility that is in the silent room flows into ourselves. A little calm, a closet does not connect under the bed. The corner is a haven that ensures us of one of the things we prize most highly—immobility. If you want to see that nothing is left, see the emptied spaces and the clothes, give me your lunar glove, you other glove of grass, my love! The house will go cold as stone. Is it possible for a creature to remain alive inside stone, inside this piece of stone? I love you, I love you, I love you, with the armchair and the book of death, down the melancholy hallway, in the iris’s darkened garret, in our bed that is the moon’s bed, and in that dance the turtle dreams of. All small things must evolve slowly, and certainly a long period of leisure, in a quiet room, was needed to miniaturize the world. A green acre is so selfish and so pure and so enlivened. A) Survey the whole B) lawn and note C) how near shadows D) increase the light. They fall silent again. As soon as we become motionless, we are elsewhere; we are dreaming in a world that is immense. There is some discomfort more active than boredom but none more fatiguing. Stillness . . . While we slept an inch of snow simplified the field. Where is the serene length, it is there and a dark place is not a dark place, only a white and red are black, only a yellow and green are blue, a pink is scarlet, a bow is every color. The barn was empty of animals. The world alone in the lonely sky, and the air where all the villages end. When a casket is closed it is returned to the general community of objects. Let the shed go black inside.
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Sources: Materials from Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (Beacon Press, 1994),Gernot Böhme’s Atmospheric Architectures: The Aesthetics of Felt Spaces (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), Federico García Lorca’s Poet in New York: Bilingual Edition (FSG Classics, 2013), Melody S. Gee’s Each Crumbling House (Perugia Press, 2010), Mark Irwin’s Large White House Speaking (New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2013), Jane Kenyon’s Collected Poems (Graywolf Press, 2007), Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons: Centennial Edition (City Lights Publishers, 2014), with a lines from Novalis and Rilke as quoted by Bachelard, and Anna Akhmatova as translated by Jane Kenyon.

Sound Cento


Does the cliff not become a unique Thou, whenever I speak to it? The poet speaks on the threshold of being. He spoke loudly, as though in order to be heard above the silence of the library. It sounds like the door in the apartment where I used to live. For I love you, I love you, my love, in the attic where the children play, dreaming ancient lights of Hungary through the noise, the balmy afternoon, seeing sheep and lilies of snow through the dark silence of your forehead. Never in eternity the same sound—a small stone falling on a red leaf. In this reverberation, the poetic image will have a sonority of being. Edges and rhythm, form and anguish, the sky is swallowing them all. Can one take captive the roar of the city. Wasn’t it formerly what it is now: a sonorous echo from the vaults of hell? He lived on the mountainside above a lake with a mythical beast he’d subdued. And we are in hell, and a part of us is always in hell, walled-up, as we are, in the world of evil intentions. The noise from other apartments sweeps under the door, seeps up through the floor. Sometimes in the evening I’ll hear gunshots or firecrackers. I like to walk out of the house in evening when the bronze light’s cast rose and people seem made all of liquid and I can walk right through them. This is not hell, but the street. Why is the sound of a spoon on a plate next door a thing so desolate? From what intimate valley do the horns of other days still reach us? Any space is not quiet it is so likely to be shiny. He is at home in the space of an ear, at the entrance of the natural sound cavity. The two elements the traveler captures in the big city are extra-human architecture and furious rhythm. The voices of the past do not sound the same in the big room as in the little bed chamber, and calls on the stairs have yet another sound. There is no air on the moon to carry talk. Is there not much more joy in a table and more chairs and very likely roundness and a place to put them. Piano music comes floating over the water, falters, begins again, falters. . . . The round cry of round being makes the sky round like a cupola. The voice in the dark doorway blocks the image.
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Sources: Materials from Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (Beacon Press, 1994), Gernot Böhme’s Atmospheric Architectures: The Aesthetics of Felt Spaces (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), Melody S. Gee’s Each Crumbling House (Perugia Press, 2010), Mark Irwin’s Large White House Speaking (New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2013), Federico García Lorca’s Poet in New York: Bilingual Edition (FSG Classics, 2013), Jane Kenyon’s Collected Poems (Graywolf Press, 2007), Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons: Centennial Edition (City Lights Publishers, 2014), with a lines from Novalis and Rilke as quoted by Bachelard.

Copy Cento

First of all, these old houses can be drawn—we can make a representation that has all the characteristics of a copy. Nobody takes Mona Lisa to be the person Mona Lisa; rather, it is taken as an image, and it is with and through this image one gains experiences. You see that it is that thing which it is and no other thing. Should the resemblance be so that any little cover is copied, should it be so that yards are measured, should it be so and there be a sin, should it be so then certainly a room is big enough when it is so empty and the corners are gathered together. The screen can be taken away from the fire as long as someone is sitting in the room. The thing is generally conceived in its closure. Half the day in half the room. I never drink from this blue tin cup speckled with white without thinking of stars on a clear, cold night—of Venus blazing low over the leafless trees; and Canis great and small—dogs without flesh, fur, blood, or bone . . . dogs made of light, apparitions of cold night, with black and trackless spaces in between. . . . Lunar creatures sniff and circle the dwellings. A terrestrial sign is set upon a celestial being. It was awhile before I understood what had come between the stars, to form constellations. The moment we love an image it cannot remain the copy of a fact. Our souls are our copies, they ignore us completely. Lax, to have corners, to be lighter than some weight, to indicate a wedding journey, to last brown and note curious, to be wealthy, cigarettes are established by length and by doubling. The simplest image is doubled; it is itself and something else than itself. And memory a wall.

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Sources: Materials from Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (Beacon Press, 1994), Gernot Böhme’s Atmospheric Architectures: The Aesthetics of Felt Spaces (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), Robert Hass’ A Little Book on Form (Ecco, 2017), Federico García Lorca’s Poet in New York: Bilingual Edition (FSG Classics, 2013), Lyn Hejinian’s My Life and My Life in the Nineties (Wesleyan University Press, 2013), Jane Kenyon’s Collected Poems (Graywolf Press, 2007), Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons: Centennial Edition (City Lights Publishers, 2014).




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Trevor Ketner holds an MFA from the University of Minnesota. They have been published in Best New Poets, Ninth Letter, West Branch, Pleiades, The Offing, Memorious, BOAAT, and elsewhere. Their essays and reviews can be found in The Kenyon Review, Boston Review, Lambda Literary, and Library Journal. Their chapbook Major Arcana: Minneapolis won the 2017 Burnside Review Chapbook Contest judged by Diane Seuss and will be published in 2018.