Poetry Sampler — Michael Brosnan

Adrift

A blood moon slapsdown its shimmering carpet

across a temperate sea.

The eye that surfacesdrinks 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

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 graspand 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.

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 isI 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

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 timidityone 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 handsas I pull them through the water,

lifting them out into the lighter air, and plunging them back into the waves where the lightrefracts wildly before giving up.

That, and the breathing, loud and frothy —and how it feels afterward, standing on the shorelike 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

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 televisionto 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 aloneand offer a silent toast to the coming year?

And how is it that shorebirds survivein such icy water with legs thinner than pencils?

— The Cider Press Review, Vol. 17, no.1, January 2015

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 seedwanting 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.

— Confrontation, Vol. 90-91, Spring 2005

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 offtheir 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, skitteringinto the wide wet welcome of the land’s cupped hands.

* * *

Some days the rain clamps downand 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.

* * *

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 joyI 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, turnand 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.

* * *

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

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 aislesof 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 herbicidesgreening the nearby golf course,

the small dead, dyed pondwhere we poked around after school,

the mercury leaking in the Soundwhere we swam, where we

tossed horseshoe crab carcassesat each other, laughing

and hoping to spear one another with the sharp tail we took

for the barrel of an army tank,

as the sun toasted us pink, peeling

our pale, freckled, Irish skin.Everywhere you look: a cause.

The myriad plastics, the methaneearth-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 memoriesnow flattened by a quickening finality.

A woman I know doesn’t wincewhen 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?”

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 itotherwise.

— unpublished

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 notesthat 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 himsometimes walking alone along the Seine under the stars —

and it is emotion he feels, the full, brilliant,immeasurable power of it, and the remembrancethat 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 anewand 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.

— Ibbetson Street, Spring/Summer 2014

Crow

One might prefer a fine salad of myrtle warble,but here we are.

You’ve plucked the blue-black feathersand 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

Unfold

Some days the sheep feel so bone tiredfrom 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 shrubberyabout 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 trailyou’re given, for the comfort that comesfrom the mutable choreography beyond knowing.

— Barrow Street, Winter, 2003