Fleda Brown

I count nineteen white blossoms
which would not be
visible except for
...

We dressed for church. I had a white hat
and white gloves when I was fifteen, no joke.
You had to do that to show God you cared.

God's eyes were stained glass, and his voice
was pipe organ. He was immortal, invisible,
while my panty-hose itched and my atheist

father chewed his tongue and threatened to run
out the door but didn't for my mother's sake,
and she swallowed her fate, this marriage,

like a communion cracker, and my brain-
damaged brother lurched around the church
nursery, and my sweeter sister watched me

with huge brown eyes to see what I'd do next.
My God, why did I turn my eyes upward when
we were all there, then, in the flesh? I am so

sorry about God, sorry we fastened that word
to the sky. God's not even legal in Hebrew.
If you get the vowel caught between the two

consonants of your lips, it can carry you
dangerously up like a balloon over what you'd
give anything to be in the middle of, now.
...

FOR

'I'm leaving you,' she said, 'for you make me sick.' But
of course she didn't say that. She thought the 'for'; she admired
its elegant distance, the way it's wedged like an iron strut
between result and cause, the way it's almost 'far,' and dire

as a raised eyebrow. She liked the way it sounds like speaking
through a cardboard paper towel tube, using it for a megaphone:
not loud, but strong, all those compacted years shoving
out the other end, as if she were certain she wanted to be alone.

OR

The first four bars of Beethoven's sixth, the Pastorale,
repeat and repeat, always with variation: or, and or,
something to violate expectations, not fully antiphonal,
only an oar dipped into the measure to make an interior

swirl, pulling the craft slightly to the side, yet ahead,
still: little cupped trails alongside to mark where
the mind turned, questions were asked, and shed,
before moving on, nothing that can't be repaired.

NOR

As a flower sheds petal after petal, as further tests
strip away one after another of the last hopes for a cure,
as a person shakes into the waste bin all her cigarettes
and goes down the street not knowing who she is, the pure

air of saints is achieved by abandonment: Jesus in the garden
alone, cold moon disappearing, Buddha at the morning star,
mind emptied of its snarl of ignorance. Neither to harden
against loss, nor to welcome it. To let it be who you are.
...

Dear friend, you were right: the smell of fish and foam
and algae makes one green smell together. It clears
my head. It empties me enough to fit down in my own

skin for a while, singleminded as a surfer. The first
day here, there was nobody, from one distance
to the other. Rain rose from the waves like steam,

dark lifted off the dark. All I could think of
were hymns, all I knew the words to: the oldest
motions tuning up in me. There was a horseshoe crab

shell, a translucent egg sack, a log of a tired jetty,
and another, and another. I walked miles, holding
my suffering deeply and courteously, as if I were holding

a package for somebody else who would come back
like sunlight. In the morning, the boardwalk opened
wide and white with sun, gulls on one leg in the slicks.

Cold waves, cold air, and people out in heavy coats,
arm in arm along the sheen of waves. A single boy
in shorts rode his skimboard out thigh-high, making

intricate moves across the March ice-water. I thought
he must be painfully cold, but, I hear you say, he had
all the world emptied, to practice his smooth stand.
...

Unless there is a loon cry in a book, the poetry has gone out of it. - Carl Sandburg

Three loons appear in this poem, twoon one side of the canoe, oneon the other, but

not stable. One drops downto nothing, emerges two minutes latertwenty feet away, quavering

his black beak's cold criesacross us to the others like a naturalbridge: oo-AH-hoo. Three loon cries

arise in this poemfrom a hollow carved outof itself, the slosh of what it says

to itself, not to us.We four in the canoe sitin the open AH, riding low as loons.

No one knows who feels what, or how much. The grievingsyllables lie over us, untouchable

oo-AH-hoo, yodeledoo-AH-hoo. Oh Lord, if we knewwhat we can take from each other, and what

we have to leave alone,if we knew which maniacal divesthe universe was thinking of all along.
...

1

The lake is a droop of spaceand we are paddling in it,
remote and yearning.
An old man and woman start out
in their pontoon boat that sputters
weeds. We find them again,
farther on, fishing. The woman
has balanced her hips on a twig
of a chair. The man spits
at the water as if he has arrivedat exactly the right place.

2

A root floats up,a gladiator's arm,
brown-studded, crooked.
Cut, it feels like cork,
or something you could
eat if you had to,
one thing standing for
another, and nothing
as horrible as it looks,snaked underwater.

3

Two great blue heron jutfantastically, pterodactyl-
beaked, carrying the sky
to a cold distance. The high
sun sinks its teeth
in the waves. We arch
our necks after the bird.
The last thing we want,
we tell ourselves, isintelligence, or comfort.

4

Dick says they subpoenaedthe farmer who penned hogs
across a feeder-stream,
their raw fecal matter
launching out, greening.
We stop and wade to where
the cold appears invisible.
We actually drink from ourhands, praying for innocence.

5

We follow the mink alongthe bank until it climbs
into the tangle of roots
where water has risen
and fallen. We see through
to clearings, stammers
of light, a few sharp red
cardinal flowers, a wholenetwork of traces, not ours.

6

A row of old docks slope and dislodge like disproved
theories. We observe
the sequence
of them, heavy and frail.
Lily pads collect
at their feet to soften
the failure. The day
is full of sunshine. We haveour canoe, our traveling.

7

Late evening, we passthrough the needle's eye
of the bridge. Our big
voices briefly catch
between the concrete roof
and black water, before
we open into our own
wide lake, our faces
extinguishing, no one to tell
if the paddle is feathered,
no crucial place.
...

I would ride highabove my own white
weight. I would ride
through the lightening
of the earth
and the darkening,
stillness and turbulence
coming on in the core
of me, and spreading
to the hard rain,
to the dazzle. Leaves
would turn, but I
would keep my eyes
in my head, watching
for grasses. This
is what I would know
deeply: the feathering
of my bones
against the bank.
For the rest,
I would be the easiest
wave, loving just enough
for nature's sake.
The world would move
under me and I would always be exactly
where I am, dragonflies
angling around my head.
Under the black mask
of my face, I would think
swan, swan,
which would be nothing
but a riding, a hunger,
a ruffle more pointed
than wind and waves,
and a hot-orange
beak like an arrow.
...

It is not the way it used to be.Aunt Cleone is losing her memory,my father refuses to paint the cottage porch,

the rowboat rots in the yard. I amwilling to let go of what I remember,not completely, but let it open out

into the past and fill it and funnelforward to this place where I actuallylie on the end of the dock swirling my finger

in the water, watching the minnowsmove without seeming to move, invisibletwitches, one, two, three minnows the color

of sand. I must be in the middle of my life, the way I feel balancedbetween one thing and another. As if I have

no hands or arms, parting the world as it reaches my face. Like a minnow, goneon little wings, a blush of sand from the bottom.

Sometimes I open my eyes in the darkand it feels as if I'm moving. I lose
my loneliness, surrounded with dark, like water.
...

We are without our men, hers deadten years, mine far away, the water
glassy warm. My old aunt already stands
half in. All I see is the white half,
her small old breasts like bells,
almost nice as a girl's. Then we hardly
feel the water, a drag on the nipples,
a brush on the crotch, like making love
blind, only the knives of light
from the opposite shore, the shudders
of our swimming breaking it up.
We let the water get next to us
and into the quick of losses we don't
have to talk about. We swim out
to where the dock goes blank,
and we are stranded, abandoned good flesh
in a black of glimmering. We each fit
our skin exactly. After a while
we come out of the water slick as eels,
still swimming, straight-backed,
breasts out, up to the porch,illuminate, sexy as hell, inspired.
...

I worry about the chicory, that tinge of pink in the blue, its sunset delicacy, even with its tough
stalk. Those ragged, blunt petal-tips.
Like my high school Pep Club skirt, pleats
sharp as knives, but someone could easily get
under it. The road here is crooked, cars fly by
at 45 or 50. I worry about how few walkers
there are, how alone nature is, out there
sprouting and budding and dying. Can the utterly
unnoticed survive? What about the farthest
reaches of the universe, the other solar systems?
There's a lot that doesn't seem to need us,
but the negative space around the flower
is what shapes the flower, so the neglect
of such a powerful mind as ours must collapse
its bloom at least a little. So much reciprocity
necessary to exist: we actually exchange DNA
with those we catch diseases from. The germs
travel to our lymph nodes, carrying a bit
of our infector: we become our enemies!
The quality of our existence is that delicate,
which is why I ran from room to room, comforting
my mother, stacking up my father's mess,
wiping my poor brother's drool. No, that's not
right. I was only holding them all in my mind
to keep them from flying apart. How tired I was,
my little body a strung bow. How small
I'd keep things, little flowers by the roadside, if I could. I would think of them day and night.
...

Say dock, dock: it's just a hollowof itself, the way the foot
echoes between wood and water,
the plank, plank of it
like piano keys, growing hollower
farther out under the stars.
Listen to the way dock's closed in
by the tongue on one side, pushed out
at the far end toward the lake
with a duck-sound, quack-
sound, where they congregate
for crumbs. It's even a tongue,
itself, saying nothing but
what you bump against it.
Or an arm, reaching out. Here
you're willing to make yourself sociable,
declare yourself separate
from the trees. "Dock here,"
you offer. Here is a place
to stop. And it's true. Indeed,
I have to stop at the end,
and think. The reason
for walking out here is
how the end goes blunt.
You feel your blood turn back
toward the heart, but
for an instant, you imagine,
it longs to keep moving out,
like Roadrunner at the edge of a cliff,
keeping on with nothing built
to hold him up. Turning back,
I carve a cul-de-sac in the air,which is a comfort, and a sadness.
...

The slightest drip of a paddleis too much. Let the canoe slide
by itself into the rushes and lily pads.
Lean far over the bow, your arm
a dead stick, drifting its shadowthrough the water.

You scoopa turtle from behind, snatch it
from the log, a hard bulgeescaped inward.

Snappers, you grab betweenyour careful fingers, arched
across the shell, back from
their craning dinosaur necks,their mute bird beaks.

When you miss, you hearthe soft blip. Bubbles trail offin deep, iridescent angles.

You don't catch themfor any reason. They scratch around
the canoe's wet bottom, leaving
stinking pools, and you bring them
two miles home. For days they wallow
and scrape their brown helmets
in the aluminum tub by the dock.
You add mussel shells and a petosky stone
for company. You feed them worms,
grubs, and a granddaddy long-legs.
You get used to hearing them.
When you go to swim, or sit
at the end of the dock feeding
the clamoring swans at sunset,
you start believing that skidding
and shucking against the tub is their real voice.

But when you let them go,they ease down the rocks and slide
unruffled and heavy as fishing lead
under the alien weedsin righteous silence.
...

They have waited for us in the country,keeping the catfish fed,brush-hogging the pond banks clear.

We must pull up a chair on the long porchwhile they hold down Sunday afternoon,circling their voices on episodes.

Then we can take the cane polesfrom against the chimneyto find what is left of luck.

Small bream toy with the ball of bloodon the hook, so when the big catstrikes, it is more than I am

ready for, driving my line down.The great ache of the pole quiverstoward heaven, before the line snaps.

For hours we watch the cork boband dive, raising clues.We wade to our necks for it.

We cast a flounder rig, its hooksvicious in the pond. It claws the cork,thrashes fourteen pounds of catfish

against the bank. The line snaps again.We take the gift of our fish talein the pink evening up to the porch.

They draw it to them like a prodigal son,full of flaws, but redeemable.They go to work on it.
...