Evan Kennedy, METAMORPHOSIS

 

 

TREE OF LIFE

In the tree of life I lose my way
upper branches tangled vines self-reflected creation
it’s not my intention to forget my origin
a sunbeam illuminates me
my descendants inferiors in branches below
my own face blooming smiling cawing
I was birthed raised from below
lifted onto a branch then fell into gravity’s biomass
The tree of life calls to me inscribes my lineage
ears enclose a sonic globe
beside me my contemporaries
close relations within touch while
I jump swing fly to others farther away I resemble less
Hold onto that image recite it
I wait for these branches to be canceled
entire history existent within me
my identity comprises life nothing more
my appearance is its alteration

The latest from San Francisco-based “poet and bicyclist” Evan Kennedy is METAMORPHOSIS (San Francisco CA: City Lights Books, 2023), published as the twenty-second title in the “City Lights Spotlight” series. Kennedy is also the author of a handful of prior titltes that I seem to have (frustratingly) missed, including Shoo-Ins to Ruin (Gold Wake Press, 2011), Terra Firmament (Krupskaya, 2013), The Sissies (Futurepoem, 2016), Jerusalem Notebook (O’clock Press, 2017) and I am, am I, to trust the joy that joy is no more or less there now than before (Roof Books, 2020). The lyrics that make up Kennedy’s METAMORPHOSIS slant and slash, each composed as monologues exploring voice, through Ovid, oracles and Apollo to the very nature and possibility of change. Kennedy threads three poems with the same title, “Tree of Life,” through the collection as a kind of tether, threading a prompt led by Ovid himself. “I’m not pursuing / you exactly but resemblance through subjectless tissue / and muscle,” Kennedy writes, to close the poem “TO OVID,” “expanding grim tradition to keep leopards happy / lounging in mossy temples long after belief.”

METAMORPHOSIS is a southern California poem of temporal shifts, and ghosts both new and old, offering a lyric examination of transformation, queerness, collapsing empires, the ecological present and a range of pop culture references to anchor each moment. Kennedy digs his layers deep into antiquity, simultaneously overlapping a contemporary San Francisco through writing the minotaur, Phaethon, Keats and Judy Garland, Roman household gods and Madonna. There is a great deal of play here, blended with an anxiety for the future while slipping through and across identity and possibility. Through Kennedy’s deft hand, this book length poem is already more than it already is.