The Tower, by Lynne Kemen

​The Tower
 
The guard has one leg,
lost, they said, to an alligator.
Or a crocodile. Neither belongs here,
not the reptile, not the guard,
not me, standing in Tuscany
in front of something that offends my eye.
 
Amphibious creatures swim the hillside,
Disney on acid, wrinkled
by too many decades of weather,
cheap, I think. Garish. Wrong.
 
Their tongues flick.
They already know.
 
I move through cards I cannot name,
the Empress, the Hanged Man, the Moon,
all of it illegible, a language
I was never given.
 
Until the towers.
 
I know the towers.
In tarot, The Tower means
lightning finds the thing you thought was solid.
Means the fall you didn't see coming.
Means: it was always going to happen.
 
I stood in front of a masterwork
of symbolic meaning
and understood nothing.
 
And still.
Something struck,
scratched at the reptile brain,
the part that predates taste.
 
Lynne Kemen

Lynne Kemen's full-length book of poetry, Shoes for Lucy, was published by SCE Press in 2023. Her chapbook, More Than a Handful, appeared with Woodland Arts Editions in 2020. She is a nominee for a Pushcart Prize, and her work is anthologized in The Memory Palace: an ekphrastic anthology (Ekphrastic Editions, 2024), Seeing Things and Seeing Things 2 (Woodland Arts, 2020 and 2024). Lynne is an editor and interviewer for Blue Mountain Review.
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