Brian Teare

Brian Teare Poems

how a birch shirks its skins : strange
grain of the language of prayer : to disturb
words addressed to where God is is
what writing is : alphabet alive beneath
...

house of each sentence endlessly hinged, house of each phrase
opened elegy
entirely latches, exactly latches, hasps, proliferant, endlessly opened, of
doors,
...

3.

interval from felt
to string a struck
ear's the soul's seat
set ringing —easy
...

4.

Now the rain
Now the seams put in evening
Now the tree seeming shakes out
of felt unfolds cleanly
...

There is no word can hold a chord no analogy fits ear
forte, into eye
a stanza a piano inside it would stifle, would rife with
hands fitting felt to phoneme, syllables to hammers, signs
...

so it came to me to
carry the abandoned
mattress to the attic
...

thought begins as small floral bowls : they hold greens—broccoli stalks,
chopped kale—against
...

Nothing at dusk, lord, but dust
and road to keep it. The field kneels
under white pines, umbra the edge
to whom this is addressed :
...

sent for you last week dogwoods
a swansong white flowers
on whitewater weather continues
...

Brian Teare Biography

Born in Athens, Georgia, Brian Teare grew up in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. He received a BA in English and creative writing from the University of Alabama and an MFA in creative writing from Indiana University in 2000. His collections of poetry include The Room Where I Was Born (2003), winner of the Brittingham Prize and the 2004 Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry, and Sight Map (2009). Teare was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in creative writing at Stanford University and has received fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts and the MacDowell Colony. A critic as well as a poet, his work has appeared in Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (2006) and At the Barriers: On the Poetry of Thom Gunn (2009). Teare lives in the San Francisco Bay area, where he practices bookbinding and printing.)

The Best Poem Of Brian Teare

Embodiment

how a birch shirks its skins : strange
grain of the language of prayer : to disturb
words addressed to where God is is
what writing is : alphabet alive beneath
the alphabet so far into whiteness
each mind to itself creation come crawling
matter out of nothing : always
longing inquiries at the threshold a question
unanswered : not skin but the look
of skin : what once overheard the talk
of God became matter : ask the birch
did the soul have a choice

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