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Three Poems by Brian Teare Californian It began like this: a radio midday, heat—remember?—a shriek on the highway, and in the yard Steller’s jays chafing over haggle, nag, their claims a lyric tableau—pretty for the eye—how sun for months stuck aureoles of chrome around everything, even your poems, omens so no other disaster would happen. But that there was dust— it had not been so before in June, grass dead at edges where a dirt spread had begun, feral cats interring piss into nasturtiums. His death had become the dropped side of a song, melody undone by damage exactly the feel of teeth entering an apple’s bruise. The trellis kept the jasmine rapt as it collapsed in its own odor; so ardor also trained the spine of your weeping into a mind, confluence of fumes and confusion. Over sills, jambs, silt sent collusion: thistle, burr, mouse turds, urine’s lingering funk in rooms where to write was a widow alone with the last broom she’d bought. Heat, with its missing finger and nine filed nails, tuned all afternoon its blue note: horizon a slack string tautening against asphalt, whose sound was drought, marsh departed before August began, black-outs rolled house to house, how perfect the fraud and emergencies. So there were two songs sung in counterpoint to jays, argument about belonging to a place,—remember— prey and prayer, one struck the other beneath the lyric image, playing flint to tinder until on the radio eastern hills caught fire: extremis, excelsis, that is how summer, all veils and exhalations, courted the hills. How already the church was burning when your soul went out to meet him, to marry his new weather— [first published in NO: a journal of the arts] Dead House Sonnet house of each sentence endlessly hinged, house of each phrase opened elegy entirely latches, exactly latches, hasps, proliferant, endlessly opened, of doors, termini effigies, each noun in a house a nova of votives, wicks ashen, burnt them, syntax like bark that smoldered the garden in winter, nasturtiums come summer undone verbs, burnt them, burnt tense, the present’s past, burnt that, house of ash, house a tinge, a reek of eucalyptus oil, burnt the wild, burnt the intractable, weedy, deep-rooted tufts of thistle’s purple furze, made house to come down, trashed, screens slashed, jambs unplumbed, without doors, made drained porcelain the old forms, gave chip, gave to stain structure, made gone what touched him, stripped paint, grain of floor, made gauged the gouge of form, form the firmament fallen, made whiteness a wall, made framed the fallen lavish tragedian shadow where a picture hung, made what’s left a nail, nib, of shadow, made it mine tongue unto nothing, made it quite, it query, quisling, quietude’s quill, that silence : writing : then sirens [first published in Verse] Two Elegies Containing Fear 1—Fragment 42 Not thought, fact offers patterns : local, habit of arrangement itself a pleasure such as the woman each morning scatters curb-side—crusts thrust in a fist from a brown bag—gesture a gist of description : Sapphic fragment, desire’s biography a long day of waiting the color of pigeon’s feathers— “their hearts grown cold, they slacken their wings”— and love they are yet sun-soft asphalt brushed with sand, each wing- span unlatched demonstrating tin chips of glint, the saturation —like oil— of plenty, spectrums— —Fear— Coast woken to unknown. To think is verge, surf, shelf edge. Interior ocean, mind a bright cry beached. Worn porcelain eggshell ivory and dry, in dilation, porous, forged open, the skull’s shell hell in which the sea kneels tongue—bang and serenade—, curls its words’ pearls’ horde of whorls. Listen— waves turn on their spit, burn surf, sizzling, stir the haphazard fat foam. Listen— it is certain emergency. The waves unravel burning skeins, skin. 2—Fragment 51 Morning a form so small hours like bees house their mouths in darkening wax—amber fast to umbra—, its way of being to be smallest in simile : ivy weaving between slats sleaves, sleak, of verdigris and deeper green; just there in the window the word lavation—slow imitation of water (wash and scour, wash and scour), light lending the hour density; “I am in two minds” while reading—the mind the bird outside the window; each sentence its shadow falling in the house—the page and a voice breaking above it, who is it enters, who is it [first published in NO: a journal of the arts] | ||||||||||||
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