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Brian Teare, the recipient of Stegner, National Endowment for the Arts, and MacDowell Colony poetry fellowships, Brian Teare has published poetry in Ploughshares, Boston Review, Provincetown Arts, VOLT, Verse and The Gertrude Stein Awards in Innovative Poetry, among other publications. His first book, The Room Where I Was Born, was winner of the 2003 Brittingham Prize and the 2004 Triangle Award for Gay Poetry.
Author of the recent chapbooks, Pilgrim and Transcendental Grammar Crown, he lives in Oakland, CA and is on the graduate writing faculties of the New College of California and California College of the Arts.
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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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