1. Poetry Sampler — Michael Brosnan
Adrift
A blood moon slaps
down its shimmering carpet
across a temperate sea.
The eye that surfaces
drinks in sky and landlessness,
then sinks away.
Since we’re out here, too,
why not pull in the oars
and drift a while, feel
the steady otherness of all this —
stirred by the same air,
buoyed by the same fluidity,
salted
and sorrowless?
— Ibbetson Street, Spring/Summer 2013
2. The Preliminary Rounds
As your son’s teacher, I’m supposed to tell you something
about his development in school,
his understanding of Ancient History,
but I don’t know what to say exactly,
except the obvious: the rope has slipped his grasp
and his boat has drifted back into that soft fog of adolescence.
He began the semester with a soupcon of interest —
taken by Hannibal, and those militant elephants stumbling
across the Alps and Pyrenees in the Second Punic War,
but by test time he quietly faded away,
as if his interest were drawn in chalk,
and nothing we did or said reignited that spark.
I don’t know, maybe he’d be better off
playing his guitar until his fingers ache beyond sore,
chord by homemade chord, swim in his own art
late into the night and come to the study of history —
and all that history reveals about our impulses, our violence,
our frailty, our intermittent brilliance — in his own time.
Or perhaps this class is too stifling — dulled, as it is,
by the need for order and pace, by the hammering of “rigor.”
Perhaps he would open up if we took to the fields more,
or the mountains and lakes, or the lovely indifferent shore.
There, maybe, he’d be our leader, first to find sharks’ teeth
among the stones and shattered, sea-worn shells,
pose questions fueled by unguarded enthusiasm for life.
Not that we venture out like that in this course. I’m just saying,
you never know with kids. That’s the maddening part.
You fall in love with a young man’s mind, praise him
with straight A’s, and twenty years later he’s drinking too much,
starting his third marriage and his fourth job in corporate sales.
3. It’s the ones who hum along in their own dreams,
who intuitively know how to get by, like runners
surviving the preliminary rounds to make the finals —
they’re the ones who burst forth one day, publish a book,
land a role on Broadway, establish some small quirky company
that blooms overnight into the darling of Wall Street.
But it doesn’t always work that way, either.
Sometimes the ones who sail through keep on sailing —
good grades, good jobs, loving spouses, brilliant children,
content Saturday afternoons in the garden of good fortune,
no curse or cancer surfacing anywhere.
And sometimes the slackers stay slack.
They don’t care now and they won’t care later.
What happens is what happens. Time is time.
Love is to take or leave, or take and take.
So what does this say about the teaching profession?
Despite all the cajoling, pop quizzes, free pencils, the truth is
I don’t know the first thing about your son. Do you?
Maybe the transparency of our own uncertainty
has left him stupefied. Maybe he already knows
what he wants to be when he awakens to the searing
knowledge of impermanence. Maybe he’s waiting
for fate to trigger any sort of something. Maybe
he’s already there, patiently waiting for us to catch up.
— Ibbetson Street, Summer 2015
4. Salt
Of course the child wants to know why —
why I swim so far out into the morning sea.
Yet, it’s one of those questions
that catches me off guard, like the timidity
one feels talking about falling in love.
It wakes me to world, I say vaguely, thinking
about the way one stroke feeds another,
the way miniscule bubbles rise off my hands
as I pull them through the water,
lifting them out into the lighter air, and plunging
them back into the waves where the light
refracts wildly before giving up.
That, and the breathing, loud and frothy —
and how it feels afterward, standing on the shore
like this, towel wrapped, the heart settling down,
staring out over the fluid depths that buoyed me,
that gave up a sleeve of salt for me,
that didn’t think to take me back.
— Into the Teeth of the Wind, Summer 2015
5. The Year to Come
I get down on the floor, do pushups
until my arms shake and falter.
It’s a good number, a number to build upon.
Kneeling, I turn on the television
to a football game in progress.
One team is winning, one is losing.
My wife has left me.
Fresh snow fell in the night
and I imagine my children on new sleds
being tugged uphill by another man,
their mittens drawing wobbly lines in the snow.
And out of this thin, shut-in winter air
small questions take shape.
Is it OK to drink champagne alone
and offer a silent toast to the coming year?
And how is it that shorebirds survive
in such icy water
with legs thinner than pencils?
— The Cider Press Review, Vol. 17, no.1, January 2015
6. Big Bang Swing Music
At the start, if one can call it that,
time turned in upon itself
and everything
that happened and would happen
crowded into that single, universal seed
wanting simply to burst forth and be known.
The nose-to-butt sniff of every dog.
Barbed wire. The first heart and liver transplants.
The turning and falling of all leaves.
Buttered toast. The reason for applause.
The invention of rubber gloves, the gravestone,
Levittown, bubble-wrap, WD40.
The need for a Galapagos tortoise
to cock its head at the sound of thunder.
Every war, every skirmish, every fender bender.
Deep space. The yawning nights of suburban adultery.
Calamity, typos, elevator music.
Flying fish. Spaghetti squash.
The coining of the phrase “After all is said and done”
and “tender mercies.”
The tongue of a vole. The trappings of desire.
My death. And yours.
The expectation that someday, someone,
perhaps in Princeton, New Jersey,
will know it all and be pleased.
8. Ponding
There’s never nothing — that’s the thing.
* * *
Some days otters slink in and out of this tub of delight,
tracing and retracing the fluid shape of joy.
Some days it’s the slow choreography
of unamused snapping turtles checking off
their grim-simple list.
* * *
Some days one or more long-distance fliers —
green-winged teals, blue-winged teals, wood ducks,
common mergansers, Canada geese, mallards,
black ducks, pintails — careening north on tired wings,
or south on tired wings, in want of coolness, nourishment — drop
out of the sky, webbed feet splayed, skittering
into the wide wet welcome of the land’s cupped hands.
* * *
Some days the rain clamps down
and the wind sweeps the slate-gray surface clean,
except in the dark of early morning,
when what comes comes anyway,
so enamored with the delivering hour.
* * *
In spring, after ice, sex-crazed frogs
sing their hearts out to lovers and predators alike.
Love me. Devour me.
* * *
9. It’s summer now,
the tail end of a slow-shifting August day.
Frogs conceal their intent among the reeds.
Damselflies, brilliant blue exclamation points,
prod the jealous sky
while the white-throated sparrows
weave their elemental wish into the pond’s scrub edge,
punctuating the easy wind in the grasses and wildflowers —
the surround of sweet whisper.
I step in,
* * *
hold my breath, slip
below the surface and feel a cold, buoyant joy
I can’t quite name.
As always, the pond has my attention.
The fullness of it.
The stirring depth of it.
This isn’t Biblical.
It’s older than that.
* * *
I surface and swim to the center
with long easy strokes, turn
and float on my back, feel the persistence
in the calm, steady current,
in the tannin-rich water welling up
from deep inside the earth and leaking
crookedly into the swamp’s gorgeous murk,
while all around me, the trout —
these muscled shards of light — strike
quietly at the chaotic script of waterbugs,
whirligig beetles, backswimmers, boatmen.
* * *
10. What better than to let the water chill me,
the current spin and keep me,
let the world speak through me —
saying what it needs to say,
while overhead, in their dizzying ballet,
tree swallows harvest every fleck of life
in the fading light.
— unpublished
11. Breathing Room
Cancer. Glioblastoma. Inoperable.
Will die this summer. My brother.
18 years my roommate.
The one I know best.
Cell phones may be the cause,
or the crappy packaged food
we so adored in the shiny supermarket aisles
of the Long Island suburbs —
that luring landscape, safe, comforting,
and deadly in a million quiet ways:
the DDT sprayed in town parks,
neighborhood streets,
the wafting clouds of herbicides
greening the nearby golf course,
the small dead, dyed pond
where we poked around after school,
the mercury leaking in the Sound
where we swam, where we
tossed horseshoe crab carcasses
at each other, laughing
and hoping to spear one another
with the sharp tail we took
for the barrel of an army tank,
12. as the sun toasted us pink, peeling
our pale, freckled, Irish skin.
Everywhere you look: a cause.
The myriad plastics, the methane
earth-burped from the town dump,
the lead in the paint, the lead
in the toys, the lead
in the gasoline fumes,
the preservatives, the food coloring,
the cigarette smoke, the arsenic,
the cleaning fluids, the sugar-drenched snacks.
And now, ladies and gentlemen,
he lies in a hospital bed
set up in his living room,
having traded in words for morphine,
riding out the final mile of a life that once
seemed endless and charmed.
It has all but stunned me to silence.
The speed of it. The haphazardness of it.
Bright memories
now flattened by a quickening finality.
A woman I know doesn’t wince
when I tell this story.
My brother. Dying.
His three children paralyzed
by the loss to come, a wife bowed
against the empty sky.
The woman I know just stares at me
with a kind expression
and asks,
“What do you make of death?”
13. You’d think, after all these years,
I’d have an answer.
I shrug. “It’s complicated,” I start,
then stop.
The woman waits for me to continue.
We are sitting in a quiet room.
The soft sounds of the living day
float gently by the open window.
I draw in a slow, deep breath.
I love the feeling
of drawing in
a slow, deep breath.
I can’t imagine it
otherwise.
— unpublished
14. Degas’ Father Listening to Lorenzo Pagans
In that simple room, bleaked with blacks and browns
and off-white light, Degas’ dad sits, angled forward,
his forearms resting on his thighs, his hands folded loosely,
his face slack-jawed in easy concentration,
focusing now not on the room,
not on the guitarist playing to his right,
not on the others gathered around him,
but on the sound itself, the strummed chords,
the balletic arpeggios and sustained notes
that slip inside to the pit of his being,
and he can’t help but cock his head, nod,
and feel a quaver of joy at the rightness of it all,
like the touch of Celestine’s hand in the night,
or the ease of conversation with old friends,
or the unexplained resolve that comes over him
sometimes walking alone along the Seine under the stars —
and it is emotion he feels, the full, brilliant,
immeasurable power of it, and the remembrance
that emotions can be good, too, can transport us,
even after so many days of wearing us down,
after so many days of being the unwanted companion
in our waking hours, knotting our dreams, all is good
again, like the guitar, like the guitarist sitting upright,
confident in every movement of his supple fingers,
like the others in the room whom he now sees anew
and admires without the slightest hint of complication,
especially the son in the corner dedicating his time
to their time together, transforming this evening
for whoever might need it years from now,
for whoever might need to pause and feel
for those who also wanted to love this world deeply,
in a different time, which is the same time.
16. Crow
One might prefer a fine salad of myrtle warble,
but here we are.
You’ve plucked the blue-black feathers
and now with a serrated knife sheer
off beak and sharp slivers of crescent moon claws.
You've got the bird pinned with your left hand
and I can see you’re afraid of crushing its skull.
The rice is steaming.
Remember how we met, my love,
and all the meals since over which we faced only each other?
You can count the twenty most popular human emotions —
and we have eaten in their honor, just the two of us,
one of us talking and the other eating politely,
or together in silence
except for the occasional sound
of sucking on cooked bones.
— Prairie Schooner, Spring 2004
17. Unfold
Some days the sheep feel so bone tired
from the hours they stayed awake in the night
to watch the stars nudge along
or from the drudgery
of moving from pasture to pasture,
annoyingly sheepish,
while their minds spin out alternate lives.
They get so they can’t hold up
their end of a passing conversation.
Avoiding the view of the shimmering sea,
they find themselves commenting to shrubbery
about the strangeness of feelings and of winter light.
But the it of them is such a delicate thing
they can’t help but cradle it in their minds,
in time bleat sweet and simple sounds:
get your rest, hydrate well, walk the trail
you’re given, for the comfort that comes
from the mutable choreography beyond knowing.
— Barrow Street, Winter, 2003
