Garrett J. Brown was born in Baltimore. His poems have recently appeared in the American Poetry Journal, Urbanite Baltimore, the Ledge and has a poem forthcoming in Natural Bridge. In 2000, he won a Creative Writing Fellowship from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he graduated with his MFA in Creative Writing. His book-length manuscript, Manna Sifting, was runner-up in the 2003 Maryland Emerging Voices competition and he recently won the Poetry Center of Chicago’s 2005 Juried Reading Contest (www.poetrycenter.org), judged by Jorie Graham. He is currently teaching writing at University of Illinois at Chicago, where he is pursuing his PhD. Garrett’s chapbook, Panning the Sky, was published in 2003 and is available from Pudding House Publications (www.puddinghouse.com).
Opposition
August 27, 2003
Metaphor is the frayed thread that connects what we desire with what merely exists.
Tony Rothman
Even before squinting through a telescope,
Percival Lowell revealed what he was hoping
to see: exquisite web of channels, evidence
of a vast Venice etched into the rusty disk
of Mars. Did he dream of green-skinned gondoliers
smoothly rowing from pier to alien pier,
soothing their linear canali with Martian song?
Skeptical scientists knew Lowell was wrong;
what we wish to see prevents us from seeing
what is.
Don’t we all wish to draft perfect
lines, envision a complete Cathedral
instead of quarrying the awkward
facts, imperfect stones resisting
the symmetry of the church wall?
Tonight, closer than it will ever be,
I watch the planet from my window and shed
Lowell’s imagined world for the frayed thread
of metaphor. Iron rusting on the surface, the same
element that warms the pigment in our veins: Mars,
a speck of blood in the cold, impenetrable night.
(Originally appeared on the website of the Poetry Center of Chicago; Juried Reading Winner 2005)
Constellation
Receding hairline, your rented room
in the wooded hills beyond light
pollution and suburbia, your penchant
for slender women with large eyes
and small breasts, talent for language
betrayed by a lazy palate and erratic
handwriting, your quiet disposition
that reminds the self-confident
they too have uncomfortable dreams—
all reduced to pinpricks.
The Giant washed ashore,
his lover’s arrow embedded
in his tree-trunk neck, eyes
fish-lipped into hollows,
seaweed beard. Her hands
molded his flesh, snowball-like,
into white hot spheres, fixed him
how she wanted to remember:
clothed in a lion’s skin,
chased by a scorpion.
Your waitress has small eyes, leaves salsa,
a large basket of chips. Excessive, you think,
as you eat alone, flipping through phone-sex ads
in a free weekly. Invisible points, too, hold weight,
these dark matters you refuse to acknowledge,
even in measured safety. You can’t remember
why Scorpio rises as Orion sets. The Giant
reduced to a belt. Dried mythology gives seed
to words, their stories sloughed—narcissism,
panic, aphrodisiac, pandemonium and mercury.
(Originally appeared in the American Poetry Journal, Winter/Spring 2006)
Lost Anecdote from the Pages of Vasari
Spring cleaning in Baltimore always involved
a yellow bucket sloshing with soapy water
and a rag recognized as the tattered remains
of my father’s bowling shirt, circa 1973.
I would be sent to the front of the house
on the first warm day of shorts
and no socks to wipe the marble steps.
It was also springtime, I would learn years later,
when Michelangelo would visit Carrara and lay
his head on recently quarried blocks. I wiped away
city grime, crushed berries, the dried paste
of bird mess. The stonecutters claim he listened
for cobwebbed whispers, ran his thick fingers
over mineral veins swirled within rock. I was
always amazed at how the marble would hold
the imprint of a leaf dropped in autumn and pressed
into a smudge by a winter of rain. If the tale is true
and the statues did indeed call out to be released
from their stone, imagine the Florentine
walking down East Pratt Street, hundreds of fat cherubs
trapped in the stoops, crying out to the Master as we sit
on their heads, resting cans of beer on their rumps.
(Originally appeared in Pif Magazine, May 2001)
Pyx
That smaller vessel of gold, or silver-gilt, in which the Eucharist is commonly carried to the sick.
- The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume XII
At one time a cup suspended
by a chain above the alter,
pulling eyes upward as though
it could condense the dust of Christ
from a cloud of incense. I don’t
believe in saints, but keep Christopher
taped to the windshield as I drive
to the nursing home. A priest will
keep it tucked in a silk pouch hung
around his neck, the weight becoming
a sacred heart that sits against
his own.
If you had a slice
of god’s flesh – thin,
pungent with the fish
the Galileans
caught, the fish that hell
could not digest – what
jewel box would you deem
fit to contain it?
To me it resembles
the disk of tobacco my brother
kept tucked in the back pocket
of his favorite pair of blue jeans,
a circle relic imbedded
in the fabric. It’s always strange,
to see it tossed on my vinyl
passenger seat, as though the Ark
of the Covenant were strapped with
a load of beach towels to the roof
of a burgundy station wagon;
children in the backseat singing
as the sun tints red to their cheeks,
coconut lotion, the sand dunes
spilling onto the road, dust grains
on highway blacktop shimmering.
(Originally appeared in the chapbook, Panning the Sky, 2003)
On Cross Street
At this three-story restaurant the sun-
dried tomatoes are soft on the teeth,
and the windows overlook long trenches
of rowhomes where parents still spank
their children and keep opened cans
of condensed milk in the fridge. I forgot
we lived on this street, back when love was
watching seagulls pick through the garbage.
You wanted something real, my lung on the table,
unfolded like a wet towel, cork particles
in the wine. Below us, gardens furrow
the thin yards between cracked slabs
of pavement. Cucumber kidneys hang
from the fences, a plastic Blessed Mother
spreads her arms over a purple eggplant heart.
(Originally appeared in the chapbook, Panning the Sky, 2003)
Copyright 2006 Garrett Brown
