My poem “Night at the Interstate Diner” is up over at qarrtsiluni. It’s part of the ongoing “The Crowd” issue, which also includes my photo-essay “The Minor Leagues.” Go check it out, and as usual, you can listen to me read it.
by James Brush
Category: Poems
Poems written by me.
Enfolding dust swirls silent
gray and separate,
the magnificent desolation
of night casting in unnoticed.
Beyond the glass,
a shadowless plain, illusion of silence,
the killing emptiness of absence,
countless broken stones,
the bones of unformed worlds.
Tiny pockmarks reveal bites,
the wind’s invisible stone teeth,
nibbling us all down to nothing
beneath the bad moons rising.
Who looks to these for love songs?
That dread moon waxing in the east?
This moon of fear rising again in the west?
—
Mars has two moons: Phobos and Deimos. Fear and Dread, the dogs of war. They’re little more than asteroids captured by the Martian gravity. Due to their diminutive size, they appear only as bright stars from the surface. Phobos moves so fast and orbits so close to the planet, it rises in the west and sets in the east. Because of its orbital speed, it rises and sets several times each night.
“Magnificent desolation” is the phrase Buzz Aldrin used to describe the surface of the moon.
When everyone else is asleep, he listens to rats scurry across the roof of the house. His stomach rumbles, and he tries to remember when he last ate. He struggles to remember other things he isn’t supposed to forget. Fearful that sleep might steal what he knows, he creeps out of his bed to the kitchen where he empties packets of ketchup and mustard onto a blue-lined plate. Using a thin carrot as a stylus, he writes in red and yellow script his products and sums, the genealogies of silent gods, and the names of animals long gone. When the plate is full, he carefully rinses it into a glass and drinks down the mud-colored water and the knowledge suspended within. He returns to bed and drifts to sleep as numbers multiply in his blood, extinct creatures rumble in his belly, and all the while rats and cockroaches sit on the roof counting stars dropping below the horizon.
This is mostly an experiment with Flickr. The poem is one I wrote back in April and I took the picture with my iphone a few weeks ago in New York. I used Flickr’s editing tools to add the text and touch-up the image. I was able to do everything I wanted to do without Photoshop, which makes me wonder if I really need to upgrade. The more I play with Flickr, the more impressed I am with it. It’s crazy I’ve had an account for 4 years, and I’ve never used it until about a week ago.
This is an attempt at doing a video haiku, basically using Dave Bonta’s approach, which I really like. In this case, it’s almost documentary. It’s from my day in Central Park last week. One thing I noticed while birding in The Ramble was that whenever I stopped for a few minutes and just watched, the ground started to move with squirrels, sparrows, and all sorts of other critters. To see it, I had to stop. I tried to capture a little bit of it on video and the haiku came from notes I wrote at the time. Sitting and watching (or in this case, standing and watching) and that quiet openness to experience that ensues is the essence of both birding and haiku. At least for me. I don’t know if this video captures any of that, but it at least documents the process.
This is a poetry postcard that was originally published at Postal Poetry, which is now defunct. It was featured on February 25, 2009.
Update 10.20.10: Thanks to Dave Bonta, the Postal Poetry archive is back up at a new url and it looks better than ever. Here’s the link to “Time to Leave” along with the brief statement I wrote to accompany it. Go have a look around over there. There is truly amazing work to be found.
We communicated in images. Flickering moments on dueling monitors. Shoes on cobbled pavement. Clothes rustle in the wind. Wind? We both understand this thing, wind. The colors are suddenly blinding. I can’t even name them. The view of open parkland and a blue pond widens to almost 360 degrees. My stomach drops as the ground falls away, earth tumbling into a pit of sky, images bleeding off the monitors now. We’re flying again. It’s all she thinks about, the only thing she’ll show. I rip the cables from my temples. She flaps them from her wings. We stare at one another across the sterile distance of the research lab. Going nowhere. Again. A white feather floats on the air-conditioned current. We’re as alien and far apart as ever. Three feet away yet separated by species and the awkwardness of the now-severed connection with its illusion of understanding and love. Can she feel it too? She doesn’t blink, her avian eyes as incomprehensible as the machines humming in this lab. I glance at the security cameras and lean in. Please, I whisper, please. Don’t make me leave. I’ll show you everything. Outside, I hear engines and the wind of ten thousand wings beginning to flap.
A flight of egrets
glides toward the setting sun—
the moon rises.
—
This is for Big Tent Poetry’s challenge to write a haibun about travel and an encounter with an imaginary creature. I love haibun, though my approach has been intentionally nontraditional. I’d like to learn more, but I also like the notion of feeling my way into something new and playing with it a little bit like the way I’ll fiddle with a new instrument before attempting to learn how to play it.
I suppose this is why my haibun tend to read more like prose poems. Most of them actually start with the haiku, which tend to be pretty straightforward and traditional. I then write a prose poem piece that goes in a completely different direction. I often think of the prose piece as fictional process notes.
Sometimes I think I might just revise the haiku out completely and let the prose stand alone, but for now I like the way the haiku contrasts with the prose and grounds the charge, bringing things back to Earth. This Earth anyway.
Do you remember the playground
where children swarmed, climbing
the backbones of ancient leviathans?
A man sold half-eaten legends
from the debris of empire,
rusted machine guns in the basement.
(sign me up)
Indian bones and arrowheads
poke through packed earth,
fingers straining against thin cloth.
I suppose we all duck the evidence
in search of answers,
making our own sense from symbols
on scientific calculators.
(here is where we solved for x)
Upstairs, old men and women
chant themselves to sleep each night,
embellishing with cadenced recall
skirts and toys and sunny Saturdays.
I am full of red wires now,
redundant circuits, ticking louder.
(everything temporary sounds like forever)
Forged bank notes blow down an empty highway.
The first blue norther rolls down the plains.
Now comes the thunder.
—
This started from the wordle list at Big Tent Poetry.