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

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