David Kopaska-Merkel, Poet

David Kopaska-Merkel started writing poetry in 1982, because parenthood didn't leave enough time for writing longer works. Since then, he has written some fiction and essays, but he found that he likes the concision and precision that poetry requires. Kopaska-Merkel's poetry has been published in print venues such as Night Cry, Eldritch Tales, Space and Time, Xenophilia, and the Magazine of Speculative Poetry. His work has appeared more recently in electronic publications including Strange Horizons, Speculon, Raven Electrick, and Ibn Qirtaiba. Seven poetry chapbooks have been published by Runaway Spoon Press, dbqp press, Dark Regions Press, Preternatural Press, Indolent Dragon Press, Smoldering Banyan Press, and Eraserhead Press. Kopaska-Merkel has edited and published the genre poetry magazine Dreams and Nightmares since 1986, and was editor of Star*Line, the journal of the Science Fiction Poetry Association, for 6 years. You can learn more about his work by visiting http://www.home.earthlink.net/~dragontea/index.html

diminuendo

Individual decisions/irrevocable actions;
they ripple through society and fade away,
leaving their traces on headstones and in hearts.
And yet so many seem to do it. Each day's paper's full of them:
bridge jumpers, cliff jumpers, abutment crashers,
self-poisoners, jay walkers, shooters, window jumpers,
overdose takers, railroad and subway track walkers,
and more and more and more.

It's gotten so I'm afraid to go to work,
not because I fear becoming collateral damage
at a farewell party for one-
I fear what I'll find when the elevator opens,
and I walk into the office, where
our secretary has spilled her guts for the last time,
and she's still alive, and I say Why?
but she doesn't answer.

Over dinner, Marie asks about my day.
Bad, I say.
She changes the subject, but my mind reels on,
Spinning through the deaths I've seen/will see.
The A.C. hasn't been fixed, she says,
The repairman hung himself last night.

Why are they doing it? I look out at the stars,
shimmering through unfathomable distances to reach me,
alone on this temporary planet.
Are aliens making us do this-do they want our planet,
like in that story by Alice Sheldon, and didn't she kill herself?
I'd make room for them, if that's what's going on.
You don't have to do this! I shout at the sky.

But it's not that simple, or if it is I don't have the secret,
all I know is that with a sudden rush I am filled with a desire to
throw myself off the balcony.
But it's not high enough, I must get higher-the roof will do.
I pull myself in and run for the stairs, but just then
a gunshot cannons through the house.
I stop, hand on the banister. All is silent.

What the hell was I doing?
Marie?
My hand grips the rail so hard it's white and red.
Marie?

After Noon

The mushrooms had a marked effect on the entire party, but most of all on
the geologist, for he spent the afternoon in the hot sun. Continuing to
measure the cliff section he had begun that morning, the geologist first
experienced a light-headedness he attributed to heat stroke. Accordingly,
he sat down to rest in the shade of the cliff, and took a long drink of
water. The water gushed down his throat and he swallowed and swallowed, but
still his thirst raged unabated. The water filled up his belly and yet he
did not put down the canteen. One would have thought the small aluminium
vessel exhausted, but the cool torrent continued to flood his parched
throat. The water level rose within him until his eyes filled up with
water, and then he was under water, with the cliff before him like a door.
So the geologist slipped into the narrow space between two layers; river bed
on one side and coal swamp on the other. It was not dark among the strata,
nor did he fail to penetrate from one stratum to another, and he swam
downward through the years, feeling the tug of each layer as he entered it.
"I am entering the Earth," he said to himself, "the Earth Mother has opened
herself to me. I am like a God." But really he felt more fish than God,
and more stone than fish, and soon he lost the power to swim, but sank ever
deeper into the pearly depths of time. He saw no signs of fossils, those
footprints he had studied for so long, but only the strata themselves, each
glowing more brightly than the last, until the light blinded him, and he
could see no more. He had lost all sensation of penetrating the layers, and
because he could not see, he began to imagine that he was falling no more,
but rising, faster and faster, rocketing towards the future like a photon in
the void. He burst out of the mountain's crest and flew higher yet, or so
he imagined, for he could still see nothing at all. But soon those flashes
of color that one sees if the eyes are squeezed tightly shut began to
manifest themselves, and he began to feel that his eyes might indeed be
closed. So he opened them, but they had been open all along, and the
flashes of color resolved themselves into a pointillist landscape, a surreal
vision of the future, in which rusting relics resembling cars and other
machines formed a backdrop for warfare among insects and rodents. Soon the
battle turned to favor the arthropods, and the last rodents were butchered
and devoured on the spot. The insects, dominated by Homoptera and
Hemiptera, were led by gigantic praying mantises like cranes. One of the
mantises, adorned with scraps of cloth and metal, seemed to become aware of
the geologist, and gestured towards him. Many of the six-legged warriors
rushed towards him, but searched about in a frenzy, apparently unable to
sense him in any way. Just as the mantis itself began to approach, the
geologist awoke with a start, and opened his eyes, to find himself slumped
at the base of the cliff in evening's long shadow, and the colors of the
desert were the fading pyrotechnics of his dream. He struggled up on
stiffened legs and staggered towards the camp, but when he got there, he
found that everything had been devoured by locusts, which flew up like birds
when he stumbled into their midst.

Reprinted from Freezer Burn No. 5.5 and from the 1999 chapbook "Y2K Survival Kit."

This time last year

The smoke from the cooking fires of the mutant yuccas a gray haze at my
back,
I moved westward, following the pull of the nodules in my skull.
Crossing the dry bed of the Mississippi I encountered
the products of another strange catalysis;
Phosphorescent cacti riding the hard west wind,
a thorny legacy of the mutagen wars.
It was somewhere east of the Rockies,
in the New Desert:
amidst black sand and white heat,
where little that's organic moves,
that I met the source of my summoning.

Your fissured lips writhe voiceless epithets from
A hapless juniper,
Transformed by metaviral infection into your gargantuan reincarnated face.
How well I remember the ruination of its fleshy progenitor;
ravaged by the phage that has recreated it,
here in the blackened desert.
Once you nibbled ripe olives from my lips,
Your smooth body glistening with reflected moonlight.
Now you subsist mainly on aeronautical cacti, luring them in like
some fishy angler,
and inhaling them, spines and all,
the unconsumed residue forming a formidable nasal palisade.

Somehow, motionless, you beckon to me,
your tormented eyes bidding me approach.
It would be so easy;
I know I'd follow the cacti up your permineralized proboscis,
and for a while I'd ease your endless pain.
But I am not ready for what you offer.
I cannot yield what you demand,
become a fading vision in
your xylemic brain.
Then, too, I am afraid
the tumors in my skull might still your chimeric heart
...or is death now your desire?

Tell me, if you can,
Do you remember viral dreams, experienced before you
colonized this coniferous corpus?
Are there others, farther west, that bear the imprint of your
body and your thoughts?
How much is you and how much the phage,
terrifying and uncommunicative?

Why don't you speak?

This poem was published in Xenophilia in 1992 and in my chapbook "Y2K Survival Kit" in 1999.

archaeolog

The Empath strokes the weathered stone,
Evoking tactile images: smoothness, yielding warmth,
the prickle of dust.
Deeper she buries her SELF in the layered history
Of this freighted artifact;
Sensations of electrostatic force, gravitic repulsion,
Odors of ozone and dust, a hint of exotic organics --
Perfume of the vanished owner? Or a cleaning agent.
Deeper. The present is the path to the past.
Give up the present, abandon all connections.
The tinkling of chimes, low-frequency rumblings, oddly
syncopated,
(speech?), briefly, a cacophony of noise.
Deeper....the empathic sphere yields love, pride;
These may be the fossilized emotions of the artist itself!
The empath's excitement shocks her partway out of the
trance,
Relax, find the receptive frame, receive the past, live it
The emotions return, stronger, they live,
She IS the artist: a fragment of vision sears the mind's
Eye. The artifact is perceived in the moment of creation,
Whole, new, and in its proper frame of reference.
Time, considered as an onion of detritus,
Peeled to its core of fossil NOW.
But where perception reaches, understanding still may fail.
The empath spirals outward to her NOW of shattered relics;
Striving to comprehend the lives that now are dust.

This poem was published in Star*Line in 1987, long before I became its editor.

Winter's page

Still pools glisten,
A breeze breathes ripples on a limpid sky-
Brown leaf-fingers brush my hair.
Your epitaph is writ in snow,
in wind over rock,
in the trees' bare wings.
Spring will forget you;
The stars revolve both day and night.

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