An Arkansas high school student recently earned a poetry accolade from the White House. David Xiang of Little Rock Central High School is one of five teens nationwide selected earlier this month to the 2015 class of National Student Poets. KUAR’s Jacob Kauffman talks poetry with Xiang.
Duet
They sit, arranged honeycomb style,
six to a side, every day at five sharp, on humid firefly-flecked Fridays.
The silence is palatable, the voices mute enough to discern
Orpheus’s lute echoing from the stalactites below.
She sits, center stage, nose blinded and ears neglected; her hands
tremble like the nervous flutter of a hummingbird, her fingers
twitch down carved ebony, 88 paths of promise and perspiration.
She listens, she smiles, as penguins do after a long swim.
Mitosis passed last year, she reminds herself.
He sits, still as a statue, chained to those wooden knobs and
polished metal, hangdog in posture but proud in action.
His mind darts from blackened circle to circle, fingers fly, the piano stays
untouched, unused.
He is like a phantom, they say,
he is like a ghost, they say, with owl eyes.
What would you like to eat? a nurse asks, smile frozen by a basilisk’s glare, inwardly
giggling as
four years of a million Lincolns and salt-stained bubbles are mixing amnesia and
meatballs in a nearby saucepan.
Nothing, she replies, the music is all I need, Mahler or
metamorphosis will be today’s main entrée. She notices that
the pianist is crouching quietly in the corner;
the orbiting pistons cranking like the clarion of an extinct clock;
a snowy grin emerges from hibernation.
