Tony Brown's Last Lines #1 ~ #5

MISSOURI BARN, MISSOURI POETRY
WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

Photo credit: Round Barn Series by Jay Beets

My connection with poet and journalist Tony Brown was made years ago as an undergraduate in a couple of classes with fellow English majors at Northeast Missouri State. Following graduation back in 1979, we had neither one seen nor heard mention of the other until Facebook came along and gave anyone who wanted to participate massive highschool / college reunion opportunities with old -- and older -- long forgotten, long remembered classmates.

Tony has not hesitated to share with his readers that the last few years of his life have been informed by his fight with colon cancer. Last month, he mentioned that he was mulling over a notebook of his earlier poems, written between 1980 - 2010, and that he would be posting one each day throughout December as a series of "Last Lines." He not only said "read and enjoy," but also granted me to permission to share them on my blog.

So, I am starting with his first five entries, paired with a series of photographs by yet another creative college friend, Jay Beets. What a blessing to reconnect with these insightful souls who, in sickness or in health, bring light and insight into the lives of friends and stangers alike through their incomparable words and images.

I think you will find Tony's poetry rich in literary illusion
(T. S. Eliot, Walt Whitman) and evocative of rural
American despair and the quest for a broader vision:
#1
Bedford's Daughters

In the spring of their pulchritude
No one would have guessed they
Were sisters.

Karen, who Aunt Edna called
"A goddess, a Greek goddess"
Certainly bore her share
Of pagan charms.

Unsinging, unsmiling in the
Back pew, shifting her perfect
Face and sculpted leanness
Like a bored-out Camaro
Mounted on slicks, burning alcohol
Hell-bound for anyplace
That wasn't Bedford County.

But was preferably a six-bedroom
Faux colonial in Creve Coeur –
A place she'd never heard of –
Fully equipped with six
Kids and a dentist.

Shelly, the oldest – my age –
Smelled like Perry's high pasture,
Which is to say like oak leaves
And naked boards in an old
Wagon, painted blue
By starlight over white,
Stubbled fields, holding
Shadows beneath thin
And moonless clouds.

Sometimes, between crushes
On minor basketball deities
And young factory studs
With dreams of "farming on
My own someday," her heart,
Firmly settled on Old Bedford's
Two-thousand black acres,
She sat by me in church.

Once, during a steamy
July revival, dear
Old Fred preaching
Hard on passion, he
Was against it, she
Held my hand for
Sixteen minutes.

That fall I left for college.

Mom saw her, repeated
Ugly stories of half
Her teeth gone, stocking
Shelves at Place's – meth.

Husbands, babies, liquor,
Beat me, don't take the kids,
Multiple DUIs,
Shock time, squalor – meth.

"And her a Bedford," Mom said.
But Karen, she glowed and gushed,
Was somewhere East, or maybe
Des Moines or Little Rock.

Old Bedford's acres long
Since sold under the
Sheriff's pistol butt.

Perry tore down the house,
Rotted deep from the inside.
Only the land is left,
White stubbled fields
Holding shadows beneath
Thin and moonless clouds.

© Anthony Brown, 2020

#2
Practice
~ Author's note: based one one of Jim Thomas' creative writing class exercises.

Q. She was depressed and drank lots of coffee. It didn't help.

A. She crossed the door of sadness, found beans no cure for madness.

Q. His heart was free like the wind.

A. Turning from bondage toward discovery
He Frenchkissed midnight goodbye, stole her keys,
Drove wild, bright hope beneath the stars.

Q. The dog was homesick and very hungry.

A. Come inside, you wet, smelly thing,
We'll microwave the fatted calf, share supper
And dream of hunting rabbits.

Q. Lightning flashed against the night sky.

A. If you want a real sky-brightener
There's nothing beats out thundring and lightner;
For lightner flashes and thundring booms,
And the cat she hides amongst the brooms.

Q. She saw something in the portrait that made her fear her own death.

A. Her image wrought in tear-stained glass,
A mirror of beauty and the grave.

© Anthony Brown, 2020

#3
Dad's Waltz

When I was three
my father taught school;
we lived in a falling-down house on our farm.

He'd come home from work
in his Yogi Bear hat
give mom a peck and turn on the charm.

My poor brother was there,
I rolled on the floor.
Supper was hot on the kerosene stove.

We had a piano, a rarity then,
And my father would play "Bill Bailey."

On just the black keys, down on his knees,
Bill Bailey, please, come home.

© Anthony Brown, 2020

#4
Prufrock's Blues
(For Bill McKay – both of them)
~ Author's note: This one requires some heavy lifting. Sorry about that. But I always thought it was goodish. I've posted it before, according to Facebook, so some of you may have seen it. Apologies to Tom Eliot -- "Il miglior fabbro".

Let us go then, you and I,
Out where Jimi kissed the sky
And get etherized with Jack D. on the table;
Let us go through certain South Chicago streets,
That smell of Delta catfish joint retreats

Of restless nights in sleazy little clubs
And sawdust stages with chicken-wire cages:
Streets that follow like a five-tone scale
From Satch's horn and Bessie's wail
That lead us to an overwhelming jam ….
Oh, do not ask, “Man, is it cool?”
Just get yo' ax and swing it, fool.

In the room the women come and go
Talking about Fats Domino.

The menthol smoke that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The big-legged woman whose nuzzles drive you, man, insane
Licks her tongue into the corners of your evening,
As you linger upon the pools that stand in her eyes,
As you fall upon your knees and beg cause she's built like a brick chimney,
Slipping it to her by the terrace; making a sudden leap,
And seeing that she was a gal long and tall,
Who curled up with her head in the kitchen and her feets in the hall.

And indeed there will be time
For a bourbon and a smoke inside the bar,
During the break with your back against the window pane;
There will be time to beat his time
To practice a lick and face the eight-bar troubles that you meet;
There will be time to shoot that .38,
And time for all the tunes in all the clubs by all the bands

That lift and drop a number on those cats;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred improvisations,
And Blind Willie moanin' 'bout John of Revelations,
While crying "It's the most!" and smoking tea.
In the room the women come and go
Wish I had me some jellie roll.

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, "How long has this been goin' on?"
To say that it's just not my cross to bear —
That St. Louie woman with the carnation in her hair —
(They will say: "He loves her like a schoolboy loves his pie.
Like a Kentucky colonel loves his mint-and-rye!)
My blue jeans rich and modest, but asserted by a simple style —
(They will say: "And that's why they call him Shine!")
But do I dare
To walk further on down the road?
In a minute there is time
For the sun to shine on my guitar someday.

For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings when the sun goes down,
the when-I-got-up-this-mornings, and the Sunday kind of loves,
I have played slide guitar and coffee spoons;
I know the voices shoutin' with the gospel call
Above the Afro rhythms of a Ledbelly tune.
So how should I presume, without new strings, to stay in tune?

I grow old ... I grow old ...
I shall wear bell bottoms and try to rock and roll.
Do I still have ramblin' on my mind? Does Duane still dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear sharp threads and duck walk on the beach
With 'Retha, Etta and Ella singing each to each.

Oh how I dig it when they sing to me.

I have heard them sailing on the FM waves
Fine blues mammas with their heads thrown back
Soulful, sexy, beautiful, and black.

We have lingered until the house lights have come on
And I believe to my soul now, poor Tony's sinkin' down
So if the river was whiskey, Lord I'd jump in and drown.

© Anthony Brown, 2020

#5
April Elegy
~ Author's note: Really just a fragment. A vaguely (and ominously) political poem written in maybe five minutes just before my 50th birthday while standing in my back yard.

The storm we had this week
beat the blossoms off
the wayward lilac bush
in my neighbor's messy yard.

Until today it stood
scented, purple-crowned
all that Walt could wish
amid this cruelest month
of victory and mourning.

Lilacs, paschal lambs
and thirty years for me
since Lincoln died in verse,
doomed union's star of ages

© Anthony Brown, 2020

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