Sharon Brogan
AutumnThe roses begin to fade and I consider
closing the windows at night but choose blankets instead. I dream that an old friend has taken to drink again, and the pain of it blooms in the dark cavern of my chest, a deep- red lily, a beautiful wound. Berries ripen on the bushes. Uncountable birds. One bright morning I find a kestrel in the dogwood, eyeing the well-fed sparrows. Flowerbeds hum with gold wasps, black wasps, grass- hoppers, a black-and-white cat crouched beneath the clematis. Old friend, how is it that people are at ease with one another? When I return from my walk by the river, a hundred finches fly up from the gate. My Past Came to Visit Today
my past came to visit today
we sat together in the garden both thicker, older, milder each carries memory of the other each carries memory for the other we stretched out our legs rested our shoulders back watched the koi drift in the pond & pulled in our nets of memory each, for the other How Not to Write a PoemKeep busy. Clean the house.
Empty the kitchen cabinets. Scrub them out. Put it all back. Organize the junk drawer. No music. No dancing. No long walks unless talking and texting with friends at the same time. Read a light novel. Or two. Or three. Do not read poems. Watch the news. Get angry. Go shopping. Drive fast. Avoid introspection. Do not meditate. Ignore your dreams. Always do two or three things at once. Watch television while on the internet. Pay no attention to non-human animals. Stay out of the woods. Avoid gardens, lakes, strange neighborhoods, and the sea. At all costs avoid the sea. Develop an active social life. Resist solitude. Party hard. Don’t wake up. Calling the GhostHow long must I sit on your grave
to elicit a visitation? Must I fast? Must I meditate on the vastness of the universe of death? Must I count my own? Must I arrive at midnight to pull your ashes back to some semblance of you? If I wake, if I sleep, will you come to me, shambling, silent, silhouetted against the summer moon? Will you speak? I closed your eyes with my own hand. I sat at your side and waited. Now I sit on your grave, and wait. I wrap myself against the night, I sit on the cold ground, where you are not. And wait. Ode to April
The waxwings have come and gone.
Blue stars open in the garden, a blue deeper than dusk. Seasonal worries are still a ways off: flooding rivers, drought in the fields, fire in dry woods. Fire leaping across the tops of trees, toward town. For now, as distant as World War III, and as close. We turn off our furnaces, shake out the rugs, sweep the bare floors. The ash trees, bereft of berries, push out buds. Squirrels dig in the unfrozen flower beds, searching out remnants of last year’s treasures. The house cat watches from the window. What do seasons mean to her? In an old woman’s memory, these years blur together. Once there were young men, piled like kindling, hard as seasoned wood. All gone now. Let us examine the symbolism of dreams
The falling dream. The flying dream.
The dream in which you lose your teeth. The abandoned kittens, the lost dogs, the infant floating in its cradle on the lake. The woman weeping, alone, in the forest. The beast with an urgent message, a critical missive you don't understand. You fall, and someone offers his hand. You reach out, but your fingers slip through one another like light, like water. You walk through the rooms of your life. They are laid out, one by one, like a rail- road flat with no corridors, no hallways. You watch your own life pass as though in a mirror, somehow reversed, somehow not quite as it was. You arrive at now. You wake in the fog of morning, slanted bars of light on the ceiling. These dreams wrap the shoulders of your waking hours, a hooded shawl for your long, flat days. My dead lover's loverMy dead lover’s lover
will visit me today. She was one of a crowd, invisible to me, ghosts flitting through our rooms, a glimpse, a hairpin in the bed sheets, an alien scent in the hollow of his shoulder. Our pasts unspool behind us, already obsolete, films poorly edited, suffering from murky narratives, weak direction, too many bad actors, too much left on the cutting room floor. What does forgiveness cost? Belief
In the late evening, when I go to close
the shutters, I see the cold moon in the eastern sky. Snow, still, in shadowed places. My dog is going deaf. He takes the stairs with care. The cat, startled, leaves bloody slashes along my arm. I scar easily. I wrap myself in my house, like an old, favored sweater. Well- worn, shabby, stained. Comfortable. Familiar. Shall I think the best of you and so be taken for a fool? Or the worst, and so be safely cynical, sophisticated, shuttered-in. |
Breaking News
Sharon Brogan. Elements: Jen Maddocks, Lynne-Marie, Michelle Godin. Click to enlarge
Once again my representative tops the list of the most corrupt. Who will we be, without the Bill of Rights? What will stop this erosion of our character, the sea eating at our coastlines; greed and lust overpowering the powerful? Needless wars and careless heat, the coming dust of devastated forests -- heedless, we entertain ourselves, evening after evening, stories of murder, rage and retribution -- diversions from disaster, actual and impending -- this sacred land and others, no less beautiful, alive -- who will we be, should we survive? What Once Would Bend...What once would bend, now
refuses. Knees complain of damp weather. My fingers mark the crows’ feet at the corners of your eyes. It’s only endorphins, synapses sparking in the brain. This heart, cracked by time and grieving, has split thin & dry as kindling. That match too close. Why Not to Write Poems“I’m a poet” makes for awkward social introductions.
No one reads poetry anymore. It’s old-fashioned, irrelevant, and adolescent. You don’t see the universe in the heart of a lily. It just spits orange pollen all over your black turtleneck and makes you sneeze. Grammar is confusing. Poems are unnecessary. They make nothing happen.* They don’t even rhyme anymore. You are insufficiently weird. Only goth teens, hippies, queers, suicidal women, and old people write poems. Poets have to read poems. You read a poem once. You hated it. The only famous poets are dead poets. There are no rich poets. You have no talent. You’re the wrong ethnicity. You don’t know enough big words. You’ve got no rhythm. And WTF are “line breaks”? You’ve read that it takes years of study and practice to write even one good poem. The only easy-to-write poems are list poems. And they’re boring. SecretsListen. I will tell you everything. The weather is turning.
Soon it will be time to unroll the Persian rugs and lay them on the polished floors. I will hold nothing back. I am brittle, like glass; like leaves of a tree too long without water; a cocoon, untenanted, exposed to the sun. This morning I wore a jacket to walk the river path. Two crows, in their black robes, pecked at the body of a thick green snake. My mother was a northerner. She carried me across thin ice. Many times I slipped beneath the frozen water. I never knew my father. Tomatoes are laid on the kitchen counter, red bulbs on the maple wood. I prepare the knife: steel blade, sharpening stone. I want to slice to the seedy centers without bruising the skin. I loved my father. He had perfect, beautiful hands. He kept them manicured and clean. There are reasons you must not touch me. My grandmother lived with God in her garden. She fed me carrots and peas, she put white lilies by my bed. I am telling you everything. It is cold here. Birch trees bend in their white sleeves, leaves hissing in the wind. A blade of sun slants down, casting serrated shadows on the hard ground. Are you listening? Do you understand? The dog waits, and waits, at the door. Yesterday, I dropped the Murano vase. It cannot be repaired. I cut myself on sharp, thin air. Measures
The weight of a man on a woman
is like falling into the river without drowning. —"Two" by Linda Hogan There are things that can’t be measured or weighed. The length of a liar’s tongue. The number of nudges required to push a specific person off a particular ledge. The weight of a man on a woman who loves him compared the weight of the same man on a woman who does not. The number of stones a single heart can hold without drowning. Stars in the universe, feral cats in the woods, fallen sparrows. The speed and trajectory of a kind or hurtful word. The number of molecules in the scent of lust. The location and direction of a particle at once. How many moments it takes to make a life. How many wounds to take one. In the late evening
—"First, all belief is paradise. So pliable a medium.
A time not very long" —Monday by Lisa Robertson Five days I sat on the ground in the Carnival Man’s booth. Such delicacy bloomed from his mouth, his hands, from fire, from thin rods of glass. I watched him make ponies and cats, spotted giraffes, ballerinas with pink slippers. He spoke to me in a language I did not know, but understood: caballo, gato, jirafa, bailarin. He sold them. But at the end of each day, there was one for me. For my attention. For my desire. Fragile treasures, too ornate for beauty, but pleasing to a child’s eye. Time – dust and dusters, cats and the curious, covetous hands of children – made them dangerous. The pony lost its head, the ballerina cannot stand. Mended and broken and mended again, sharp-edged and enticing, too pretty for boisterous life, unbalanced, they lean against the back of the antique china cabinet. The space between
the dream
between sleeping and waking the pause between breaths of a dying friend the silence between waiting ♢ |