Brendan Bonsack

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Grandpa

It just could be we inherited
The spaces into which you stared

Palpable, like clay,
Thumbed without touch into everyday

Objects: the cheap ceramic statuettes
Of English setters and other creatures

Frames yellowed by mists of tobacco
And all your various pipes

Arranged in parade beside
Paperback westerns and other pulp fictions

All glistened in the bathe
Of noon television or late night test pattern glare.

Under foreign trees, it was said,
You killed seven men

And buried your friends
In the mud,

By a creased and unknown
Uniformed man

In a chapel of empty chairs.
These things you take with you,

Conveyed to flame by automation
And polite sliding door
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Photography by Reka Jellema (Click for enlarged view)

A Loom

Her lap is a loom
Her hands a steady weft
And from the weave a murmuring
Of moths on threads unseen,

Unheard, she listens for the man
Who comes to call, to sit upon the stool
Pulling at the cotton til
Her fingers find his wrist

Cuffed and white and crisp
The buttons tightly imitating eyes
Tucked away in creases and lies
About the place, about the time

As though by stitch and by
Stitch she could hide him
Crouched and hushed and hazardous
As a fine shirt pin

 (This poem is a collaborative poem created with poet Reka Jellema, who is also a VerseWrights poet)
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Guitar

I place my ear
Against the body
Of my first guitar

The way I have seen
Young women sometimes
Press their cheeks
Against the bone-cage
Bellies of horses

The sound in its body
Is different from this angle

Like notes chasing one another
Round wooden corridors
Rattling the radiators
With cups and spoons
And scratching their names
In the banisters

Or sometimes,
At the brushing of my thumb
Across the aged
Dull strings,

Like the rushing of blood
Through rosewood aortas
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​Brendan Bonsack's profile

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The Dances

Grandma married a man
From one of The Dances

All paid for by
The hospital

A girl of eighteen
In a village deplete

Of men save for accounts
Of heroic deeds and
Stilted typeset eulogies

Photographers would always
carefully position his hat

And I wondered about
Their first kiss

Before curfew and the band,
Quite underpaid and pissed,

Had ducked under the last
Drape of fog

And she was alone
With his stiff gauze hands
And his mouth
Of borrowed skin

Knowing the touch and
trying to remember the feeling
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Without Possession

All along the bended mesh
A severance of swallows
Gathered
Gathered here
Gathered here today

You arrive
Without possession

The rusty click
Of gate
Rejoining its place
Among the pickets

Squinting through a fly screen door
Peeling at the corners
I must to you
Seem as much a shadow
As you to me
A vivid apparition

Even as our shoes
Pestle the powdery drive
And we collide
Silent as the seam
Of adjacent days

Forehead to forehead
And a gathering
Of hands
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Halfway

At forty-seven,
I expected her to be
Half-way

But there are tiny
Things in the body
Possessed of a far
Greater wisdom

And this night is my new meridian
Where seas pound each other
To a state of equipoise

My bath-wet skin
In the hallway
A phone clenched in
Something resembling
My hand
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Yesterday's News

I have to admit
that after a while

I simply bought
yesterday's paper

at half-price from
the pile out back.

There are no days
in this place,

the nights as synthetic
as the synchronised orbit of trays

and, besides, the crosswords
are just the same:

They spell LOVE in every
other way but easy
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