Tony Brown's Last Lines #18 ~ #23

SUNRISE, SUNSET
WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

Stunning Photographs Here & Below
By Jay Beets

For those who are just now joining this sequence of poems and photographs, please check out Tony Brown's previous poems:
#1 ~ #5
#6 ~ #10
#11 ~ #17
on my recent Fortnightly posts, complete with an explanation of Tony's goal for December 2020 to compile a selection of his favorite work, culled from notebooks and journals that he wrote between 1980 - 2010. Tony has christened this project,"Last Lines," reflecting his ongoing struggle with colon cancer. The poems do not shy away from the blankness of lost time, the bleakness of mid-winter in the mid-west, the barrenness of a "shattered stained - glass" dream. Yet, despite the cold, the emptiness, the despair, all is redeemed, for Brown's narrator, by a rose and a tender gardener.

It was my idea, with the generous consent of yet another talented friend, to combine Tony's poetic imagery with the visual imagery of Missouri photographer Jay Beets. Thanks to both artists for enriching our lives and landscapes with their vision. I hope that they -- and you, trusted readers -- might appreciate these pairings as much as I. As I told Jay, I love nothing more than sitting for hours looking at pictures, reading poems, and searching for a good match!

Tony Brown's "Last Lines" concludes with a funeral (see poem #23, below), that long - ago innocent kind of funeral from our memories of ". . . endless childhood days when no one died / except old people whom my parents knew." Now we know better; now we know that a hardened heart can still be broken.

#18
Square Bales
~ Author's note: Here is No. 18 of the Last Lines series. Some of you will have seen it as I had other copies besides what showed up in the lost briefcase. Poets are no judge of their own work, but I unashamedly love this one -- just as, I suppose, all old men love their vanished youth.

Flushed and full your first beauty rioted
like Queen Anne's lace along the creek
filling my slender heart with the unspoken scent
of fencepost roses while warm hours
stretched across our solstice
beside the tumescent geometry of raked fescue

Duane bailed, Bobby and I bucked and stacked
you drove and helped tie in, brought us ice water
to drink and splash across our brown, shirtless shoulders
I remember the long muscles in your arms and feeling quite
embarrassed to be kissed in front of all your brothers

Of course, no one makes hay like that now,
economies of scale and improved hydraulics
being more than a match for the effortless
strength and grace of the deep-winded, perfect young
big bales are, after all, business for
busy, bellied men with weekend land close to the city

And so you are lost to me, swallowed by the
flint prairies lying west of an uncrossable river
watered with an inexplicable failure of adolescent nerve
the sandbars and snags of various mid-life diseases
-- all the usual decadences and addictions

I dropped in on Steve last week on the way to a conference
and saw you, matronly with kids and husband,
magnetized to the refrigerator and not flattered
but for those ageless arms and some nameless, lingering grace
parting outside we tossed two ragged bales into
Steve's new pickup, traction enough for a hard winter.

© Anthony Brown, 2020

#19
Donna's Face

~ Author's note: Suddenly I find myself working on a book, a slender one, to be sure, but something with enough leaves to justify covers. So, given the cancer, it's a race, which at the moment I'm winning -- we'll see. Or in my case, we won't see.

A note on the last line. It's a pun. A "losing stream" is a creek or river that gradually loses water as it runs downstream, generally due to a porous limestone bed -- a feature common in the karst geography of the South Missouri / Northern Arkansas Ozarks.

Pencil-sketched on faded newsprint
your variety staled to mere essentials
fibers brushed by faulted memory

The straight mouth a smear of graphite
smudged lines suggest a weakened chin
gray eyes lifted toward the distance

Then, so little, not a face
at all, charcoal shadows over
limestone valleys, a karst landscape
of all our losing dreams.

© Anthony Brown, 2020

#20
Out of Egypt I Have Called my Son
~Author's note: A sort-of Epiphany poem for that bleakest of all seasons.

Decorated in the fading green
of a dying season, Plaza women
pose in rootless glamour, winking dry
seductions sung in five-watt harmony

While across the naked asphalt of
a barren mall lies the Shepherd's Place
dark as a womb, grammarless, graceless and
waiting shabbily for its miracle

What room is left at this budget inn
of memory following a November of
cooling passions; clutching at your Pendleton
against the chill of our sterile Advent

We mourn not Christ but still a child for that
now safely stowed beyond our meanest prayers
I recall your shattered stained-glass face
whose shadows hid the desert road to Egypt.

© Anthony Brown, 2020

#21
After the Sale

~Author's note: This was written in 1999, but it is set in 1973-'74 during the Midwestern farm crisis, when gasoline and diesel prices tripled due to the OPEC embargo, and soybeans became more expensive to produce than the harvest was worth.

Thousands of family farms went under, many of which had assumed heavy debt in order to buy land during the prosperous 1950s and '60s.

The federal government's response was to subsidize big producers, and simply let small farms -- many of which had been worked by the same families for more than 100 years -- go under.

Maniacal support by farmers for Donald Trump can be traced back to this crisis, when many producers irrevocably decided that establishment politicians -- and especially urban-leaning Democrats -- simply didn't care about them. The result of that distrust has proved disastrous.

Apart from me you lie like dampened twine
curled over wrinkled sheets in this warm
September dawn of drought across the fields
our new town lives untouched by ruined corn.

Even if it rains, and they say it might,
it's too late to save anything but weeds
stunted ears for what few quail are left
and beans enough to give the blackbirds hope

Of course our food all comes from California
or boxed fresh from livestock factories
where chicken breasts are stamped out like hubcaps
plump on hormones and imported grain

The government says, and surely they would know,
that so few farms are left they're not worth counting
so that worried women driving combines
across dusty midnight fields as their husbands
clutch at one more ragged hour of sleep
lose only dreams too small for reckoning.

© Anthony Brown, 2020

#22
The Rose in my Side Yard
~Author's note: A love poem to end an especially loveless year.

I.
The rose in my side yard blooms yellow
and scents the damp breeze with
silent psalms of love and victory

The rose in my side yard yawns
under the first warm sun of June
and forgets the cold, uncovered hours
when I lacked a careful eye for beauty

No blood-red flower,
my rose has rain-soft thorns
that gladly fail to bite
with blame or sharp regret
or stinging, empty desire.

II.
These sanctified and holy days
when clear skies ring with notes of praise
and interlocking petals fold
around my thawed, awakening soul:
amazed I stumble into grace
and watch the sunrise kiss your face
as you kneel and work the earth
and life long buried finds rebirth
blooming under new-made stars,
the rose I love in my side yard.

© Anthony Brown, 2020

A stargazer by any other name . . .

#23
Call Waiting
(For T.A.B.)
~Author's note: While this is kind of a serious poem, there is a lighter side: for centuries we have had the Petrarchan sonnet and the Shakespearean sonnet. Now we have the Brownian sonnet: two five-line stanzas of iambic pentameter blank verse and a third four-line stanza of iambic pentameter blank verse.

Death bleats from the smartphone in my pocket
but it's just a pre-recorded sales pitch,
not the call I know must shortly come
to break a heart that surely should be hardened
against the end of one who only suffers.

Someday soon I'll pick up and hear
long-distance silence, tears and family dinners,
short visits in my impoverished middle age,
endless childhood days when no one died
except old people whom my parents knew;

Who smelled like Legion halls and Sunday church
or Mrs. Alexander's old fox stole
that bared its glistening yellow teeth at us
over the oaken eighth pew back from heaven.

© Anthony Brown, 2020

Next Fortnightly Post
Sunday, March 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