Brenda Hillman Poems

In a side booth at MacDonald's before your music class
you go up and down in your seat like an arpeggio
under the poster of the talking hamburger:
...

—Once more the poem woke me up,
the dark poem. I was ready for it;
he was sleeping,
...

After Ed Sanders
We'd been squatting near the worms
in the White House lawn, protesting
the Keystone Pipeline =$=$=$=$=$=$=>>;
i could sense the dear worms
through the grillwork fence,
twists & coils of flexi-script, remaking
the soil by resisting it    ...    
After the ride in the police van
telling jokes, our ziplocked handcuffs
pretty tight,
when the presiding officer asked:

— Do you have any tattoos?
— Yes, officer, i have two.
— What are they?
— Well, i have a black heart on my inner thigh &
an alchemical sign on my ankle.
— Please spell that?
— Alchemical. A-L-C-H-E-M-I-C-A-L.
— What is that?
— It's basically a moon, a lily, a star & a flame.

He started printing in the little square

MOON, LILY, STAR


Young white guy, seemed scared. One blurry
tattoo on his inner wrist    ...     i should have asked
about his, but couldn't
cross that chasm. Outside, Ash
Wednesday in our nation's capital. Dead
grass, spring trees
about to burst, two officers
beside the newish van. Inside,
alchemical notes for the next time —
...

Each day the job gets up
And rubs its eyes

We are going to live on in dry amazement

Workers push the granite bed under the avenue

Bed of the married
The re- the pre-married

Making a form as forms become infinite

The scrapings scraping

Graywhacke chert

People wait for their bumpy little pizzas
Theories of theories in gravity voices

Melpomene goddess of tragedy bathes

Mostly the bride never the bridesmaid

Angel food in whole foods

Consider Tanguy whose lunar responses to childhood
Made everything a horizon

Those walking upside down don't know what to think

The finch engineering itself to deep spring

Or you life tired of being cured

How many layers
Of giving up are there

One of it

Two of everything in the arc you save
...

A brenda is missing—where is she?
Summon the seeds & weeds, the desert whooshes. Phone the finch
with the crowded beak; a little pretenda
is learning to read
in the afternoon near the cactus caves. Near oleander & pulpy
caves with the click-click of the wren & the shkrrrr of the thrasher,
a skinny pretenda is learning
to read till the missing brenda
is found. Drip of syllables like olives near the saguaro.
Nancy Drew will find the secret in raincoats & wednesdays
& sticks. Nancy whose spine is yellow
or blue will find the brenda in 1962,

Nancy who has no mother,
who takes suggestions from her father & ignores them.

Gleam goes the wren ignoring the thorn. They cannot tell the difference.
Click of the smart dog's nails on linoleum.
Nancy bends over the clues,
of brenda's locket & dress. Word by word
between syllables a clue. Where has the summer gone, the autumn—
are they missing too? Maybe Nancy
will parse the secret & read the book report on Nancy Drew:
"neat pretty sly cute." Syllable by syllable
& still no brenda! Nancy
puts her hand to her forehead; is the missing
girl in the iron bird? is the clue to the girl in the locket?
...

The last ice age had been caused by a wobble.
After it passed they made houses from stars;

Visitors would peer in
And see the tongs not slipping,

Roomsized pebbles having been moved far.

It's like this more
When we speak than when we write;

Loving thus we have been
Loved by ground,

The word being
A box with four of its corners hidden;

Everything else is round.
...

The earth had wanted us all to itself.
The mountains wanted us back for themselves.
The numbered valleys of serpentine wanted us;
that's why it happened as it did, the split
as if one slow gear turned beneath us. . .
Then the Tuesday shoppers paused in the street
and the tube that held the trout-colored train
and the cords of action from triangular buildings
and the terraced gardens that held camelias
shook and shook, each flower a single thought.

Mothers and children took cover under tables.
I called out to her who was my life.
From under the table—I hid under the table
that held the begonia with the fiery stem,
the stem that had been trying to root, that paused
in its effort—I called to the child who was my life.
And understood, in the endless instant
before she answered, how Pharaoh's army, seeing
the ground break open, seeing the first fringed
horses fall into the gap, made their vows,
that each heart changes, faced with a single awe
and in that moment a promise is written out.

However we remember California later
the earth we loved will know the truth:
that it wanted us back for itself
with our mighty forms and our specific longings,
wanted them to be air and fire but they wouldn't;
the kestrel circled over a pine, which lasted,
the towhee who loved freedom, gathering seed
during the shaking lasted, the painting released
by the wall, the mark and hook we placed
on the wall, and the nail, and the memory
of driving the nail in, these also lasted—
...

We bury the sparrows of Europe
with found instruments,
their breasts light as an ounce of tea
where we had seen them off the path,
their twin speeds of shyness & notched wings
near the pawnbroker's house by the canal,
in average neighborhoods of the resisters,
or in markets of princely delphinium & flax,
flying from awnings at unmarked rates
to fetch crumbs from our table half-spinning
back to clefs of grillwork on external stairs
we would descend much later;

in rainy neighborhoods of the resisters
where streets were taken one by one,
where consciousness is a stair or path,
we mark their domains with notched sticks
of hickory or chestnut or ash
because our cities of princely pallor
should not have unmarked graves.
Lyric work, flight of arch, death bridge
to which patterned being is parallel:
they came as if from the margins
of a painting, their average hearts half-spinning
our little hourglass up on the screen.
...

The labeled bins on the California hillside
catch the glint and quarter-glint of passing cars.
Families pull up with their interesting trash
and start unloading: Here, sweetheart,
this goes over in Newspaper. The bundle
hits with a thud. Diet soda cans
spin almost noiselessly down, and the sun-
permitting bottles from a day's pleasure
are tossed into Mixed Glass by the children
who like to hear the smash, unknowable, chaotic,
as matter greets itself and starts to change.

What mystery is inside a thing! If we peered
into the bin, we could see it waiting there,
could believe everything is alive and specific
and personal, could tell by the tilt of one
bottle against the next that it's difficult
to be singular, to have identity, to keep
an outline safe in the terrors of space.
Even the child knows this. Bye, bottle! she shouts,
tossing it in; and the bottle lies there
in the two o'clock position, temporarily itself,
before being swept into the destiny of mixture. . .

And what if some don't want to. What if some items
in the piles of paper, the orange and blue
envelopes from a magazine sweepstakes, numbers
pressing through the cloudy windows
with our names, some among those pale sheets curled
with moisture, would rather stay as they are.
It's spring; we've thrown away mistakes—
tax forms, recipes, tennis-ball-sized
drafts of poems—that which was blank
shall be made blank again—but what if
that failed letter wants to be a failure,
not go back to pulp, and thought .. .
Or across the parking lot, where light insists
on changing the dull cans, a few cans don't want
to be changed, though they should want to,
shouldn't they, should want to be changed
by light, light which is called sweet reason,
honeyed, spectra, magnitude, light that goes
from the parking lot looking helpless
though it is matter that has been betrayed. . .

All afternoon the bins are carried off
by those who know about where things should go,
who are used to the clatter the cans make,
pouring out; and the families, who believed change
would heal them are pulling away in their vans,
slightly embarrassed by that which refused . . .
The bins fill again with hard substances,
the hills bear down with their fugitive gold,
the pampas grass bending low to protect
what was briefly certain and alive with hope.
...

Often visitors there, saddened
by lack of trees, go out
to a promontory.

Then, backed by the banded
sunset, the trail
of the Conquistadores,

the father puts on the camera,
the leather albatross,
and has the children

imitate saguaros. One
at a time they stand there smiling,
fingers up like the tines of a fork

while the stately saguaro
goes on being entered
by wrens, diseases, and sunlight.

The mother sits on a rock,
arms folded
across her breasts. To her

the cactus looks scared,
its needles
like hair in cartoons.

With its arms in preacher
or waltz position,
it gives the impression

of great effort
in every direction,
like the mother.

Thousands of these gray-green
cacti cross the valley:
nature repeating itself,

children repeating nature,
father repeating children
and mother watching.

Later, the children think
the cactus was moral,
had something to teach them,

some survival technique
or just regular beauty.
But what else could it do?

The only protection
against death
was to love solitude.
...