Tony Brown's Last Lines #11 ~ #17

THE DEER, CASUAL OBSERVERS,
ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

Thanks again to Missouri photographer Jay Beets
for sharing his vision of so many curious, contemplative
animals with whom we share our woods!

For those following along, I am posting a few more selections from the "Last Lines" collection of Missouri poet Tony Brown. In addition to previously noted themes of small town strife and literary allusion, the follwing verses honor the Boy Scouts of America, martyrs young and old, and various ghosts of the past, Christmas and otherwise.

#11
Scourge of Squirrels

On a country schoolteacher's salary
One chooses leisure carefully
My father picked black walnuts
An economical hobby since
There were three in our backyard.

A tall one in the middle, straight
And guiltless, filtering the sunset
Two lesser, somewhat crooked,
Twisted, thieving limbs
Escaping over the shaded alley.

In the cooling fall before breakfast
On sleepy adolescent Saturdays
I would watch him at it
Gathering green-mossed hulls
Across the soggy grass
Like a great, blond bird.

He was a beautiful man, my father
Ridiculous as a martyr
Holy and victorious
Knight errant scourge of squirrels.

© Anthony Brown, 2020

#12
Boston Box (A Case of Selectric Memory)

In idleness I sing,
in this morning after alcohol,
looking for a poem somewhere between the pounding
of my head and the hammering of the teletype
and wondering where all the music went
that used to flow through stained fingers
and a broken ballpoint.

Urgent, there is no news today,
or poetry either,
only a few squeaky notes between
vicious strokes of the editor's blue pencil
while I sit across from the slot
waiting for the phone to ring
and hoping it won't.

My column is blank;
I am not filing today.
For the copy that can be explained
is not the eternal copy.

Posts bearing a merchant's façade
play bob-apple with the sun
as I return from my beat with the sheriff.
He has arrested no one today, only a juvenile,
but outside the gray world lies incarcerated
behind sleek aluminum bars
in a prison old as Adam
playing bob-apple with the sun.

And so I play at literature between burglaries,
at dactyls amid city council disputes,
carving a by-line of verse into a monument of newsprint
allegedly committing metaphors in connection with the
liquor store slaying of Billy Joe Doe late Friday
shortly after 11 p.m.

Only this as the deadline beats me about
the head and shoulders with a three-inch
Boston box framing a caucasian male
charged with manslaughter second.

As a bricklayer staggers his stones to heaven
so I pile my words from hell to breakfast.
But even in the obits there are orphans and widows
and Old Lady Qwerty leering like a slut
having beaten me again.

Some happy morning all 42 keys will sing in tune
and the paper-hatted god of printers will transfuse
me with rich, black ink as I slash
my facts and bleed them into print,
dying happy under a banner headline
just after I throw this damn machine away.

© Anthony Brown, 2020

Another Little Friend ~ With Ears Wide Open

#13
Paradise

Christmas among the palms
basking in the Christ child's
Mediterranean climate
while seeking a few days
grace from snow and memory

As I flee to paradise
the question must be asked
what made him flee his?

The sun-drenched golden streets
the warm ocean of eternity
hills lacking ice or crosses
the easy beach and shells
of washed-up, grateful souls

Is that the answer then?
after that three-years'
drive through the flat
red Georgia clay
that God as man transfigured
flew south and set up shop
in Tampa?

© Anthony Brown, 2020

Christmas Cardinal

#14
Ordinary Time

Grand passions serve their turn
and we had them, didn't we dear
before the old year died?

Who might have guessed that
cruel, beautiful us
could lose our legs at last
and fall, broken, into grace?

Now with each millennial day
marching sternly toward Lent
one can't help but think
of the downhill slide
toward something final

Better off just praying,
waiting like a virgin
for that Easter when
graves go obsolete

He'd be 16 this year
and worrying his Mom --
girls, cars, six packs,
all the wrong friends

So what's one afternoon,
a little nausea and bleeding,
a few salty tears,
against love's numinous anxiety?

That's why two angry children
did him in during Ordinary Time
days outside the calendar
stopping for milk afterward

Now, years of random passion
later a wounded we
make a sort of love
from bits and empty places
A mid-life mating with
no joy but its own
closer to death than birth
the end of applied biology

I wonder if he knows
how very much I miss him,
or what a small loss my life
will be set beside hope?

© Anthony Brown, 2020

#15
Gleaning
(To my fellow Eagle Scouts of Troop 99)

Half-frozen boys working a
40-acre bottom patch above
Sugar Creek north of Gilman

Whatever coat I was wearing it
wasn't near warm enough by half,
my hands were numb inside wet gloves

Camp that year was $17.50
Old Witten paid us 50 cents
a sack of squirrel-ravaged ears

It must have been a Saturday
our fathers, mostly men from town,
huddled around a kerosene stove

The morning was perfect November gray
and I was thinking, hell, Aunt Edna
would just give me the damn money anyway

All I had to do was ask.

© Anthony Brown, 2020

#16
Letter to a Mistress

~Author's note: This one is a prose poem [click to read] -- I had been reading a lot of W.H. Auden and Henry James. It is long, depressing, dense, and difficult. But I'm hoping that some of you will stick with it. Obviously in Dec. 2000, I was not feeling my best.

Look who else is Looking Back!

#17
Last Week at Camp
(For Steve, Gail, Brad, and Clark, BSA)

Just down the chapel trail
very like a lover
lightning strikes the lake
and rain falls from a chlorophyll sky
turning the dust to mud
while I dream of sleep in anyone's arms
sheltered by the fragrant skin of old canvas.
In the sudden popcorn of an afternoon storm
we've run for cover to these green communal wombs
to talk and smoke damp cigarettes
to drink hot pop
to ponder the mysteries of foldable women
to go blind nil at hearts.

But I am tenting alone this year
and even the benediction of rain in late July
cannot wash me back to boydom
against the current of shorter days and deeper passions
against the pleasures or being
smart and pretty enough
to make a splash at a good school
to swim the joyful, vicious currents of
Equity greenrooms and professorial liquors
with pavement underfoot, neon over eye,
eggs and champagne after dancing all night
of Mozart, good dope, bookstore weekends
-- and of wearing, for god's sake, long pants.

The sumac fades to old bronze
tiger lilies wilt and rot
soft maples whisper rumors
of chill mornings and russet splendor,
and I am shaving every day
then aching nightly for an insignificant other
who lies in a bed under a roof
whose body smells like burning, suburban leaves.

The storm passes as a sudden sun shines through
a hole in rosy clouds Wally calls the Eye of God,
so in this brief, sweet evening
there is still time for knee socks and khaki
for Retreat and a swim
for late talk by dreaming boys beneath
a sky full of heroes we have learned to call by name.

© Anthony Brown, 2020

MORE TO FOLLOW . . .
Next Fortnightly Post
Sunday, March 14th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogsppot.com

Tony Brown's Last Lines #6 ~ #10

WINTRY WORDS, WINTER HORIZONS,
WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

Pink skyline / light ~ taken by Missouri photographer Jay Beets
on St. Nicholas' Day 2020 ~ but perfect for St. Valentine's!
Additional thanks to Jay for all photos below.

Poems for the heart on a cold Valentine's Day
by Missouri poet Tony Brown
#6
Valentine's Day
(For Christina)
~ Author's note: . . . this is one of my very favorites. I hope y'all like it. . . .

February's bitter end, a break in the weather,
ice barges flowing crewless down to Cairo.

You had the girls in shorts
and our coats piled in the back seat,
molted skins of a false spring
while the worst of winter waited,
frigid tears and icy affections,
the killing frost of silent, insurmountable promises.

But that day there were long, warm shadows,
and we lounged in sandals beside soft snow,
ate hot dogs and napped above the gleaming river …

Shading our eyes with cardboard hearts.

© Anthony Brown, 2020

#7
Hobby Farm
~ Author's note: I've always liked this one. But, then again, the ones I don't like I throw away.

It's been a good year, according to Uncle Bob
we had rain, I mean, man, we had rain
in his voice you hear the scar tissue of
the dry years in the '30s when his dad

just died, as people did on prairie farms,
coughing topsoil from their lungs and leaving
only dust and love and bitter hope behind
to boys manned at 12, soldiered at 18

they lost the farm, of course, just in time
for Bob and Dad and my uncles Lee and Bill
to rescue Western Civ for corn-fed children
who, when we bothered, noticed only that

fields were green, rain was inconvenient,
and dust was what you ate or mother swept
Bob, meanwhile, ran his schools and had
his dinner, raised my cousins, loved Aunt Shirley,

bought the farm, 300 acres worth
of beans, that with all the rain we've had this year
sob their roots into river bottom dirt,
caress the August wind with tears and kisses

we worry about the palsy in his hand
Shirley, wide awake, cries through all
his dreams, calves that died, corn that burned,
leaving dust and hope and bitter love behind.

© Anthony Brown, 2020

#8
After the Party
(For S.B.N.)
~Author's note: Yeah, it's schmaltzy and romantic. But I'm an old man now, and to quote Robert Browning, "How fair she was."

The party had gotten crazy when you picked
me out of the crowd; I was half drunk and you
said I could sleep on the floor at Florence Street.

Later, after working 'till dawn we'd sit
and count the stars until first light when sunrise
made for a sleepy champagne-and-eggs retreat.

Slinging drinks and music in cowboy bars
dreaming someday that we'd both be stars
we went to bed but not to sleep in the tiny
room at the back of the house on Florence Street.

Just a little green house in a sad little town
just two college kids finding love
we broke our hearts then we cried our tears
we wasted days, and then we wasted years.

What would happen if the boy I was
and the girl you used to be could meet …

Would we arrange for the future to change
In the little green house on Florence Street?

© Anthony Brown, 2020

#9
Preaching the word
~ Author's note: This is a short essay [click to read] and not a poem. There are three or four of these I want to include in the series. I was, after all, a newspaper columnist for a good chunk of my life.
Upon occasion, Tony and I have shared
our opinions about the damaging effects
of fundamentalist religious beliefs, when
imposed upon impressionable, young minds.

#10
Sunset

~ Author's note: I wrote this back in the 1980s when I was setting up an old-fashioned word processor for my father -- about the most non-tech person who ever lived.

The contraption, already long out of date, was essentially an electronic typewriter attached to a small screen and capable of storing text on palm-sized floppy discs.

It strikes me that this poem has a new meaning given my grave medical condition. Basically it describes me -- an old word processor nearing eternal obsolescence.

To edit existing document
Or to erase existing document from memory
That is the question

To continue with the magic floppy
Or break our staff and suffer a sea change

To stick with slings and arrows
Or endure the petty iniquities of pre-cyberspace
In these strange days when electron shadows
Not only walk but dance across the screen

How quaint to spin poor verse to the
Antiquated algorithm of a daisy wheel
Pecking out small syllables on a sunset CPU
So far beyond the realm of tech support
That analogies are still possible.

© Anthony Brown, 2020

[All of the comments following this one are great; please click to read!]

MORE TO FOLLOW . . .
Next Fortnightly Post
Sunday, February 28th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogsppot.com