Brandon's Repose Poem by Guy Northam

I read the poem ‘Dog Park'
by a guy called Brandon Brown;
a New Yorker, I think, but that may have been his literary subterfuge or my misreading. I read it when I returned from a fire call in our shiny red fire truck, having been wrenched from my bed and called to a fire that wasn't a fire in a plant room that was actually a ventilation duct. It was the usual story of an unreliable, over-excitable witness. I'd sat there in the cold truck waiting for the officer to make a decision, that the fire wasn't a fire and that the plant room was actually a ventilation duct. But, eventually, I got back to the station and lay in bed and read the poem ‘Dog Park', which didn't have a dog or even a park in it and was really about how poems could be sneaky and just creep up on you, and that you shouldn't let them get away, no matter what. It was bristling me. I thought, ‘You're a poet, get up and give it your response'. Anyway, I read the poem, considered these lines and finally returned to my warm bed and sleep. I guess what I'm saying is that I agree with Brandon, that you have to fight the lethargy, the pull to do other things, that verse comes uninvited and you have to be ready and receptive to it. Forget the dog, the park, the fire truck, the idiot witness and the tiredness that comes from it. What counts is an inspiration and the ebb and flow of words, the communication and connection between writer and reader, that verse, the New Yorker and this Englishman.