James Brasfield

James Brasfield Poems

James Brasfield Biography

James Brasfield (born January 19, 1952 in Savannah, Georgia) is an American poet and translator. He graduated from Armstrong State College, and Columbia University, with an MFA. His work has appeared in AGNI, Chicago Review, Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, The Iowa Review, New Orleans Review, Poetry Wales, The Seattle Review, and The Southern Review. He taught at Western Carolina University. He was visiting assistant professor in the University of Memphis. He was a Fulbright Scholar at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Ukraine. He teaches in the English Department at Pennsylvania State University.)

The Best Poem Of James Brasfield

Early Afternoon, Having Just Left The Chapel Of San Francesco

Radiant the delayed calmness,
—Do you feel it, I said. —Yes, you said,

of what only each can know,
kernel of radiance, the globo terrestre
of a water drop, not the passing adaptations
of canonical light, but seconds stilled—

our hearts beating through the moments—centuries
of the next tick of a watch relieved,
a world enough in time to imagine
Piero walk to work across cobblestones

toward a completion, his close attention
to sunlight passing through shadows
owned by the sharp angles of buildings,
sunrays warming what they touch.

Piero, first a painter, is not a monk.
He will make what welcomes light
a source of light: slow the day
he will add lucent black wings

to white feathers of the magpie
ever alight on a roof-edge.

I found a feather on a stone, feather I thought
from the angel's wing, that arc of light
held aloft in descent, shared with us
and Constantine in his dream.

I think of a white egret returning home near
the high creek, through unwavering
evening light, to sleep, sleep at Sansepolcro,
where we were headed in a rental car.

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