Edward Brash Poems

[edwardbrash-blog]

Farnum Road

It is the name of the road as spelled above that makes a difference. Not because Farnam or Farnham is wrong but because only Farnum, as in Barnum, is right. Only it reveals something of the road’s exotic nature, beginning with a fire station and ending in a kill.   It is a very Wagnerian road. Spelled otherwise it loses whatever frisson a road can manage and becomes a verb form or a sandwich. It is about 4 miles long, which would get you from CBGB’s to the Waldorf. Halfway there, sitting on a rise around a bend, are the remains of a wheelbarrow, rusted, wheel-less, its handles twisted into horns of a bull. A Picasso. All these woods are posted so claiming it as found art would be both theft and trespassing. There are people living on this road you never see and some you see too often. I do not regret the purchase of this house; it was a cold winter and I was ready for spring.

[edwardbrash-blog]

Sunday in the Afternoon at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden with Bernie

Among the excesses of a perfect spring day, of ferns, allées, of buds and birds, of distinct and individual flowers, and herds in hygienic hats, there

comes a roar too close to ignore but too distant to decipher. It is the chorus of young and fretful Brooklynites for Bernie.

It reminds me of the sound ballparks used to make when approached from city streets in certain kinds of weather: you could hear the crowd before you saw the place and from the crowd

you knew the score. Today, Bernie is winning. Might botany’s fragile pastels tremble at that shape of sound or is the wind contributing to political pressure on the vernal home?

The man has not a chance of being nominated. But on a such a day as this anything is possible. The noises are the vocal equivalents of show time at Yellowstone or

roller coaster panic, a rhythmic swell beneath a soloist of sorts as practiced in the Masses of medieval chant; it goes from roar to whisper, always in acclimation.

What the natural world thinks of Bernie is irrelevant; it has other fish to fry. Like ancient carp ascending with open fish lips from depths of the oriental garden pool

for bread and selfies. If the collision of two massive stars—each thirty times the size of our sun—changes the distance between a pair of mirrors in Huntsville, Alabama four one-thousandths of the diameter of a proton

can you imagine the minor clamor a few thousand Democrats in Brooklyn makes across the universe?   Nothing more or less than nothing.                                                               (April 2016)

[edwardbrash-blog]

Going to Williams

One must go north to learn, to that         cold angle, perpetual         winter and place         of judges, New England. One goes in a top-coat, patting the ribs, hustled         toward the storm’s center where         winds drop and one drops         through the drain         of the porcelain air.

I remember first things: first poem, first law,         first love, and little thereafter. It became         a contest to survive. In November the rains came; from December to March         we were buried; in April         we re-took the porches; May         was too late. There was beauty, yes, in those icicle images: the rough shadow pitched on the         snow bed, locomotives from the mouth;         but the head soaked in Keats         languished. It fell away then, the program of studies,         mis-used, mis-applied, until all that was left us         was one balding knee,         a Lear of a leg,         awaiting the bandage of spring.

Out of the north         the skaters damaged me, those         at home in an ice         age, tender and handsome, whose         laughs are as looping         and dangerous as pucks struck         in a field-house. I cried before them, remembering how once in a different league         I had covered a ball-field so accurately         that I could have punished them

         on their own precious turf,          but had lost the skill and desire. Going to Williams, going away from everything cosy          and familiar, to have my offense          perverted into at          best a defense. Forced          to start again, awkward, unnatural, hampered by hair,          acquiring the habits of those I despised.          My God, that          was an education.

Stars painted on that perfect dome never knew me. Snow on a postcard never melts. Yet          here I am back          almost home,          repaired,          my northern journey          over. Between knee-high piles, in parallel rows,          freshmen split the shoveled snow          in a photograph I ran          across last week. Their eyes          are lost in the reproduction; One is always half-way to          where one goes.

[edwardbrash-blog]

Guide to the 20th Century

“So, I‘ve found some pretty remarkable magma here; give or take a few years, it’s probably early Rooseveltian; just a cluster of rubble now, suggesting wars and a tectonic shift in the culture.

Wealth accumulates up here; you can tell that because what we have here is very wealthy debris: im- penetrable glass, helium, kitchen middens of duck liver.

A Trotskyite intervention here, paper currency of dubious denominations: men in suspenders making fussy transactions having no observable purpose.

What did these people eat if not duck liver? Black plastic bags? Just wondering. There appears to be more war but slipped in between the years like interleaved flowers is an outbreak of color on an unusual scale.  

You don’t want to go too far down this offshoot of democracy; others have disappeared down there and are now known only by screen images.

Now here is an igneous mass, vast and dense, as if its molecules are as unwilling to separate as lovers after the act; a tidy

preserve in an otherwise messy patch of marmalade. Clintonian probably. The rest is pretty much up for grabs.

One piece of written evidence, however, survives; its edges are uneven as if ripped away from something else. It says: ‘Coming Attractions.’”

[edwardbrash-blog]

To the Husbands of Certain Bennington Girls

Sooner or later they leave you; not family or remorse slows their going nor professionals restore them. Their gardens grow sorrel out of season and no miserable ditch protects their vegetables from ground hogs. Living with them is perpetual San Francisco.

Are we less scrupulous than other men or merely more hung up? For they do, in college, screw, and wintry warmth kept my khakis happy, Henry covered with bruises.

But households are anathema to these creative spirits, these meteors mothers and fathers ignite and expect to cover the sky; I was in Canada when mine went off and shrapnel flew compared to which Niagara's plumage is an elixir; inconveniently, it was aimed at me.

Do not mourn the passage of the species, they are travelers for ballades and fictions, and rare in the lukewarm waters that breed; they are barren as a dirt farm in Georgia, have several stomachs and will not come.

First sex is the irreversible knot, the snuggest of all, its grip tremendous; so if we are disinclined to see the magnitude of the calamity, thank God for the perilous reasons why they ultimately abandon us.

Perhaps we are not worth keeping. But I'll tell you this: she quit without a fare-thee-well and in an indecent haste to depants for another; for reasons like that (and not the balsamed dawn where the young discover the oldest fun) may we be spared the winners of magazine contests.

[edwardbrash-blog]

More from the Food Co-op: The Parm Squad

Since Camelia retired from the MTA and left the food co-op, I am now the Parm squad. It is a one-person operation. A wheel of authentic Parmigiano-Reggiano weighs in at about 80 lbs; cows are heavy unyielding creatures in any form; this wheel is all cow. It now rests on a stainless steel table in the basement of a commercial building in Brooklyn. My job is to break into it. We have special tools. Shims open a pathway across the wheel’s diameter into which is slipped a slender wire that is used to divide it in half; think amputation by dental floss. I am down on one knee like an ancient archer pulling the wire back with my right arm, pushing the parm away with my left. The table is shaking but the crust does not budge. If and when it does I could expire in a hailstorm of spaghetti topping.

Upstairs, shoppers await their wedges of parm. The crowd is not languorous, the mood is not sunny. Time is money, etc.

I feel like the field goal kicker late in the game, the skinny kid without shoulder pads in Capezios, on whom the entire enterprise depends. Parm is, in the food co-op world, our platinum single. A man from Chicago showed me the numbers. People with surgical gloves are now patting the parm as if it were a recalcitrant pet: “It is too cold,” they say, shaking their heads like unanimous rabbis. I am watching the football disappear toward the goalposts.

[edwardbrash-blog]

Love in the Age of Photomechanical Reproduction

She is sitting in a white canvas chair on the porch reading a book about native grasses and scanning a place where she has just planted some.

If you think of them, the grasses, as people, they are slender, blond, and massed like marathon runners; or, as animals, they are a herd of Thomson’s gazelles.

Her shoulders are slightly hunched over the book whether from concentration on the deer-resistant qualities of certain   grasses or from the sling of the chair or the curve of the earth.

Were she using binoculars or a microscope, she might be mistaken for Erwin Rommel, Marie Curie, or a scout; without a scope, she appears to be daring the grasses to rise to full height by the force of her eyesight alone, today.

If our children were grasses, they would be tall enough to screen the road, which is why she has planted them, the grasses, in the first place: to screen the road. I, on the other hand, dreamy, stand and look

at her looking at grasses through a screen door that divides her from me and her person into dots as a continuous-tone photograph must be turned into dots

before it can be reproduced in print. Our eyes turn the dots back into what we see. It is called the halftone process.

Love works that way: it is not a continuous-tone anything, but an imperfect impossible facsimile of what we think it should be.

[edwardbrash-blog]

North East Baptist Church

The weekend people are all in   the Hawthorne diner now or   touring the outskirts of the town, its bike path on the old train tracks that once divided things. It is

a lowly town without the scrupulous New England architecture found in the town next door: no library with its flanking lawn that makes one pause to reconsider literature and its place in the everyday life of rich and poor.

Dump trucks thunder down 44 spilling doom and debris; they screech to a halt at crosswalks for tiptoeing elders who always have the right of way. It is a perfect summer’s day.

At the Rite Aid, lipsticks are on sale, every shade, coral to purple, which one young waitress on her break tries, one by one, judges, and deliberates. Somewhere brunch is being served. Brunch     is a concept foreign to most day laborers

who crowd Patco at dawn for coffee, gas, and lottery tickets that they store in sacred pockets hoping for good luck. If awake, I am there to buy the Times dodging Audis and pickup trucks.

About now, if heading north, you come upon its vast blue bulk just beyond the last stoplight. Once in the day you might have stopped here for a cigarette but today you try to reconcile religious doubts with the honest statement of its form and tower.  

This is none other but the house of God, it tells you unapologetically,   Erected by the BAPTIST CHURCH Society 1828. The letters are cut directly into stone. There is no room for error.

Across the street, a bank, another Patco making promises. I, inclined to not believe in much of anything except the Mets and psychotherapy, am no potential convert to a system based on words. My feet are weak and I cannot sleep.

What possessed the Baptists of North East to anchor here like Noah and his ark and me I cannot say unless it was the extravagant dove that brought back whispers in the shape of leaves from some distant unopposable retreat.

I am thinking about stopping at the Rite-Aid for a tube of MAC Frost Angel Pink. My wife uses it like sunscreen for her soul. Some day something like that might come in handy.

[edwardbrash-blog]

Stravinsky’s Octet for Winds

You are seated next to Irwin Shainman, a professor with whom you share a music stand; you are trumpets 1 and 2; your

pressed corduroys are taut but not too, you will attack this tricky piece, along with trombones, bassoons, a B♭ clarinet, and a flute, for about 16 minutes

and then possibly go to Bennington for a kiss; your tongue plunges into the mouthpiece like that of a reptile on fire, the sounds are brittle, metallic,

the polyphony is transcendental, it rushes wildly beautifully, then ends quietly like a parachute collapsing. Here

is poetry, something to devote your life to. Like warfare or professional sports.

[edwardbrash-blog]

How to Photograph a Fish

If you hurry, you will be on the road before dawn in the cab of a truck with heated seats and a salad bar.

Yesterday you were at the Fly Shop in Redding purchasing waders, which is like a fitting for a suit but rubber.

Your friend is conferring with a salesman in secret fish talk, they are both pretty tight-lipped.

To cast, you must swing your arms around, let the line fly behind you, let it rest on the water, and then whip it forward over your head at the target.

It is not as easy as it sounds—like algebra or breaking the land speed record or deciphering Linear B.

You may feel the fish is laughing at you. No, says Matt, it is merely ignoring you.

Matt is our guide, he could terrify Hemingway.

You wish to cause the fish as little discomfort as possible so you de-hook it with the care a mother takes detaching a nursing baby

from her breast and Matt takes a picture of you holding it, the fish, crosswise before throwing it back into the river.

It’s not a football, says Matt, just drop it overboard. You obey. Who’s in charge here anyway?

In the photograph, the fish shows one good eye as when a visitor turns to say goodbye.

[edwardbrash-blog]

Before the Storm

It is quiet in here and I am listening to a Pierre Boulez piano sonata and thinking about Ulysses S. Grant. This is not so surprising:

they both learned very early that they were very good at something and then did something else.

It is a wrong turn any one of us might make if given half a chance: win

a war, write a great sonata (#3), then go abroad or join the dress-up crowd.

My wife is reading while the music plays, there is not enough noise in the Boulez to distract her, just random drops of sound

and clusters. At dawn, Grant’s men began their counterattack and spun the South around at Shiloh.

Tonight, a storm is promised. It will be a storm. As if a shower might make it wrong.

All the great laundry in the sky is hanging out to dry; there will be an eclipse or something.

I face her and understand all I can learn by trying.

[edwardbrash-blog]

The Last Greek in Istanbul

You will encounter him on your way to somewhere else—St. Savior in Chora for the 14th century mosaics or the Ayvansaray Gate where an opposing army breached the city walls (1453) for the first time in ten centuries and brought with them the Ottoman Empire.

These are formidable destinations: handsome, moving, mute. To get there you will take a bus from a depot on the Golden Horn near the Galata Bridge—a Marx Brothers scene. Once on board, a child Turk approaches with a crooked smile: you think she is begging; she offers you her seat.

You will get off, see the sights, be misdirected instead by tiny mullahs on bikes to the nearest mosque; say goodbye to the Norse goddesses; head back to the hotel, and notice a dark door on a sidestreet. It is open. Inside, a property that was once a garden adjoins an old building that is still a church.

“You love my goats?” He stands in the doorway, gesturing toward five bearded goats—sleek, black and brown. “They are Greek.” He speaks no known language but needs no translator. Inside, Demeter is mentioned on the walls in the alphabet of heathens, the niches are Mary-less but we are in Byzantium. “You wish some tea?”

He sweeps us further in, we stare at a blank wall he insists is a mosaic of the Virgin. For a heavy man he is quite light on his feet— like Anthony Quinn in Zorba the Greek— a man among the ruins in a neighborhood in Istanbul where once Greek merchants called Phanariots, who served the Sultans, lived, and now is known as Fener.

[edwardbrash-blog]

Donora Smog

In late October 1948, a thermal inversion caused smog to develop over Donora, Pennsylvania, a small town southeast of Pittsburgh. For three days smog enveloped the town, with tragic consequences.

1. If there’s a soul in Pennsylvania, if there’s machinery to blame, it’s the steel mill on the river   and “Mule-Train” Frankie Laine.

What’s Frankie got to do with it you might complain with midnight in the morning, afternoons of yellow rain?

We huddled by the radio to listen to the ponies run my uncle bet religiously, my uncle never won.

It wasn’t much of a song anyway. The smog entered every room like peanut butter on the move and in Donora there was gloom

as when the Pittsburgh Pirates failed to score from third with no one out. There was no living bird.

From that day on “Mule Train” dropped precipitously from the charts as if that man were still on third and now there were two outs.

2. Some blue is in the sky now, green where once dirt brown; green is nice, blue too for you but never for a steel mill town.

The killer smog killed twenty, the rescue did the rest,

U.S. Steel went belly up it was probably for the best.

The place is ash and ruins now like Athens after Pericles— a poor example: an ancient heaven to a striptease—

but for a time it was heaven, a harbor for insomniacs, a freight train in the dead of night, a path uphill to nowhere, “Mule-Train” Frankie Laine.

My uncle kept on contributing to the racetrack in his head, there are no mules in Pennsylvania and all the ponies are dead.

[edwardbrash-blog]

My French class

(Stark illumination falls on a table top, otherwise the room is dark. Shadows mingle in the darkness, chair legs scrape, the atmosphere suggests interrogation. An arm is seen placing a book on the table, several books. What follows is all in French.) “So,

how was your weekend?” Our prof Nathan (pronounced nay- TAUN) looks hopefully around the room. It is Wednesday night. No one can remember anything about their weekend.

Nathan makes his living from teaching these classes. What we are doing here is another matter altogether. In

the movie based on this poem, character actresses are seated at the table, there is an ingénue with a tattoo, a Simone Signoret look-alike  

who owns an uptown restaurant, there’s sometimes a guy or two but not for long. Nathan is Mallarme’s faun.

Following the weekend is homework, which we always ace because answers are in the back of the book but most of us get there honestly. Then there is grammar.

You don’t really want to get too wrapped up in French grammar. It strangles imagination. Even the French admit that once they learn it they promptly forget it. “Today,“

Nathan proposes, “the subjonctif,” a hydra-headed monster almost as difficult to describe as use so most don’t unless there is no other way out.

It can depend on what precedes or follows it, on what its purpose in a sentence is, or on phases of the moon.

People have been known to cry. So we take a break and like a spout turned on the class splashes into movies, TV shows, pop singers

like Adele or the Academy Awards. I am better at the subjonctif than Academy Awards; I am so 20th century.

Which makes me calculate my odds and question whether heaven is really paved with cobblestones and Beaujolais. (Of course it is.)

It is next Wednesday. “So, Edouard, “how was your weekend?” I listened to Adele I say.

[edwardbrash-blog]

Cleaning the Pollock

Today we are cleaning the Pollock. Yesterday we cleaned the Matisse and tomorrow morning the Ellsworth Kelly in the basement. But today we are cleaning the Pollock. Its canvas is yellowing, dirt and dust in its crevices, it is showing its age: Aren’t we all.

Here are sponges and cotton-tipped swabs soaked in a gentle, pH-adjusted solution, which we use like Viagra for middle-aged art work. Moist erasers too. Hard against gauzy bras under   transparent shirts, pretty interns put their nipples on view. Moist erasers too.

And here is evidence of the wrong paint, probably used to cover up cracks after the painter was dead. If we shine infrared light on the subject we can easily determine if the painter is dead or not. But what can the rest of us do to cover up cracks after death?

As you can see, Pollock’s canvas has been placed on the floor just as he painted it, but at its center and bottom are trickles of paint that could not have been dropped from above. They are known as vertical drips, and are not worth speaking about.

Now here is a spot where the paint formed a crust around a cornered house fly. Outside most things fly free among the artistry and accept what they cannot improve. But we are a race of fixers and fools. So today, today we are cleaning the Pollock.  

—after Henry Reed’s “Naming of Parts”

[edwardbrash-blog]

Lachrymosa for Richard P. Brickner

“This the telling craft: to let modulation itself be the subject, to alter nothing enough to be noticed, but to notice that nothing remains the same.”  — from my poem, Adagio Season, 1960

You picked it apart, said it was nonsense,  

you, in your insufferable defense posture, your contempt for Shostakovich.

I knew that it was good, had come to me on a magic carpet of inspiration

through a certain window. I plucked it from the air.

The air grows chilly in the afternoon leaves burn and drop.

Who were you to criticize me anyway, you who were sleeping with one of your students

if only on the telephone for crying out loud.

Its trajectory was perfect, a perfect arabesque of English words

committed to a fruitful theme. The Lacrymosa, Brickner, only eight

bars are in Mozart’s hand; Sussmayr wrote the rest.  

All is gone: fruit, leaves, you. I passed your avenue recently

they are building a subway tunnel underneath it.

[edwardbrash-blog]

Merchandise

“Wish to buy a bike,” I say to the man with a gold tooth at the far end of the bowling alley that is his store. “Three- speed,” I say. “Flat-earther,” he is thinking. “Only 21-speeds,” he says, “3 on one side, 7 on the other,” moving his hands as if squeezing lemons. Twenty-one speeds to me means seven bikes. I want only one. His phone rings. Above me a village of bikes hangs upside down. Like bats. I wait for one of them to whisper, “I’m a 3-speed.” “It’s Verizon,” he says, which more or less ends our transaction.

The deal is, bike stores cannot sell used bikes. They act as brokers between buyers and sellers, with an assist from the Internet. Which explains the bats in the bowling alley. I learned this later. I feel I am slipping into an undertow of bike culture. My bike hero is a young woman who mounts her Peugeot every morning at nine and pedals uphill in all kinds of weather. Her bike has a basket in front. It is a 3-speed.

Think how many great bike photographs you have seen. Almost as many as of dogs and Paris. Or movies. I go uptown looking for Paris. Jeremy is behind the counter when I get there. He is a high school student. “A 3-speed?” Enter Augie, a black man with a light baritone voice who would play Richard III in the style of Nat “King” Cole. “Here is a beauty,” he says, and wheels up a pale blue confection trimmed in taupe, the French word for mole. She is slim but not bony, nothing like a mole. More like a fashion model. She is a 3-speed. We are listening to Ella Fitzgerald sing “So in Love.” This is the way I like to do business.