In Prague
In Prague, I don’t want to look anything up
any longer. I want to go to the Kafka bookstore
that is not the Kafka bookstore.
I want to see the mammoth ivory under glass again
and still be in awe when it turns out to be resin,
ask nonplussed, how did they create
such a likeness, such resin.
I want the swarm of students to flank the bench
I am sitting on by the Pantheon atrium
outside the second floor bathroom.
A girl will step on my shoe
barely apologizing, and an otherwise-prominent
corner room is filled with a single rhinoceros skeleton
seven feet long like a middle-aged man
shooting hoops alone in a gymnasium.
I want one brick that probably comprised a whole wall
once to be the most striking object
I see today. Yes, that did belong to a wall.
Here is the wall in plastic now, someone else’s alcove
blocking my way around the entire
neoclassical museum I have misunderstood.
I wanted there to be Muchas. I wanted
the only Muchas to have been printed
to adorn these central ramparts where now extend:
minerals without number, an evolution of frogs,
the stem from the last fern tree found in our country.
I want to correct the caption to “their” county,
removing myself and other travelers.
I put out my hand into the next dim conclave
as if wading through fronds set against me
by my creator;
I am not Wenceslas walking.
I am evading children with a practiced coldness
still unsure of which king is the “good,”
which St. Agnes’s brother, or which
clock will tell me when I’ve arrived
beyond my conceit for the building, the sky,
to reveal to me every answer.
I grasp about for foliage of my self-inhumation;
in burial, I will bring all once-treebound limbs
to the ground, their eventual place
of growth, prematurely.
Off the path, I want for nothing,
an anti-beggar unencumbered of need
and its notions, a soldier laying down
waiting for the enemy to pass.
The king moves toward his goal in the night,
and a steam, having to do more with natural history
than art, rises from footfalls in the snow
but not mine. Yes, not mine.
Luke Janicki lives in Seattle, Washington. He has published poetry in Trampset, Dipity Literary Magazine, Quarter Press, Apricot Press, Floating Bridge Press and other publications. He holds a B.A. from Gonzaga University and an M.Ed. from the University of Notre Dame.