Running to Meet You

STORYBOOK HOMECOMING
WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

Papa's Coming ~ 1874
See Mother up on the porch, in a red dress?
Thanks to Gerry for pointing out this endearing detail!

Print attributed to Charles Armstrong & Co.
Photo Courtesy of Library of Congress

You just never know who might be out there waiting to greet you with open arms. Could it be Mama or Papa? A darling daughter or a prodigal son? Could it be Happiness or Kindness or Clarity of Thought? Each of the following authors have personified such possibilities. The reader's task: open your mind to optimism, open your heart to hope, look all around, and listen closely. Keep your arms open, ready for that hug!

#1 ~ Welcome
"You must always be ready for something to come bursting
Through the far edge of a clearing, running toward you,
Grinning from ear to ear
And hoarse with welcome."
~ David Wagoner ~
from the poem "Staying Alive"

#2 ~ Happiness
"Ever since happiness heard your name,
it has been running through the streets trying to find you."
~ Hafiz ~

#3 ~ Happiness "Happiness turned to me and said – 'It is time. It is time to forgive yourself for all of the things you did not become. It is time to exonerate yourself for all the people you couldn’t save, for all the fragile hearts you fumbled with in the dark of your confusion. It is time, child, to accept that you don’t have to be who you were a year ago, that you don’t have to want the same things. Above all else, it is time to believe, with reckless abandon, that you are worthy of me, for I have been waiting for years.' ” ~ Bianca Sparacino ~
Happiness

#4 ~ Forgiveness & Mercy So when you wander far from the fold of God, or when you live in such a small way because you don’t trust that you are loved and worthy to be loved, know this: that all the forgiveness and mercy and reconciliation of God is already yours it will not be taken away as a punishment and it will not be granted as a reward, it is yours no matter what. When God sees you, God is filled with compassion. Even if you are still trying to get over, even if you’re not ready, even if you truly have turned a corner and started to become the woman God intended you to be, even if you have never felt well-loved, even if you can’t forgive yourself. Even if you have never really told the whole truth. Even if you aren’t interested in it. All the love and mercy of God is running toward you. The DJ has been hired and the dancing begun and the feast prepared before you even walked in this door.~ Nadia Bolz - Weber ~
from Slightly Off-Brand Children
A sermon on the Prodigal Son
for inside the women's prison

The Prodigal's Return ~ 1920s
by Ambrose Dudley (1867 - 1951)

#5 ~ Kindness
" . . . kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend."
~ Naomi Shihab Nye ~

Kindness
Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

~ Naomi Shihab Nye ~
From Words Under the Words: Selected Poems

#5 ~ Clarity of Thought

Winter Syntax

A sentence starts out like a lone traveler
heading into a blizzard at midnight,
tilting into the wind, one arm shielding his face,
the tails of his thin coat flapping behind him.

There are easier ways of making sense,
the connoisseurship of gesture, for example.
You hold a girl's face in your hands like a vase.
You lift a gun from the glove compartment
and toss it out the window into the desert heat.

These cool moments are blazing with silence.
The full moon makes sense. When a cloud crosses it
it becomes as eloquent as a bicycle leaning
outside a drugstore or a dog who sleeps all afternoon
in a corner of the couch.

Bare branches in winter are a form of writing.
The unclothed body is autobiography.
Every lake is a vowel, every island a noun.

But the traveler persists in his misery,
struggling all night through the deepening snow,
leaving a faint alphabet of bootprints
on the white hills and the white floors of valleys,
a message for field mice and passing crows.

At dawn he will spot the vine of smoke
rising from your chimney, and when he stands
before you shivering, draped in sparkling frost,
a smile will appear in the beard of icicles,
and the man will express a complete thought.

~ Billy Collins ~

["The Imperial Messenger" by Kafka tells a similar story]

The Return of Prodigal Son ~ 2009
by Iszchan Nazarian (b. 1946)

Such a great, beseeching visual of this parable!

Next Fortnightly Post
Wednesday, April 14

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 #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

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

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

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

Home Is Where the Art Is

A HOUSE ADORNED WITH HANDIWORK
ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

To go along with this crewel embroidery
by Gerry's maternal aunt, Margaret Saucell (b 1931),
here are two poems by Portland, Oregon, poet
Hazel Hall (1886 - 1924),
in which she describes the beauty of needlework for art's sake
and the motivation for its creation, residing in the heart of the artist:

Heavy Threads

When the dawn unfolds like a bolt of ribbon
Thrown through my window,
I know that hours of light
Are about to thrust themselves into me
Like omnivorous needles into listless cloth,
Threaded with the heavy colours of the sun.
They seem altogether too eager,
To embroider this thing of mine,
My Day,
Into the strict patterns of an altar cloth;
Or at least to stitch it into a useful garment.
But I know they will do nothing of the kind.
They will prick away,
And when they are through with it
It will look like the patch quilt my grandmother made
When she was learning to sew.

~ & ~

Two Sewing

The Wind is sewing with needles of rain.
With shining needles of rain
It stitches into the thin
Cloth of earth. In,
In, in, in. Oh, the wind has often sewed with me.
One, two, three.

Spring must have fine things
To wear like other springs.
Of silken green the grass must be
Embroidered. One and two and three.
Then every crocus must be made
So subtly as to seem afraid
Of lifting colour from the ground;
And after crocuses the round
Heads of tulips, and all the fair
Intricate garb that Spring will wear.
The wind must sew with needles of rain,
With shining needles of rain,
Stitching into the thin
Cloth of earth, in,
In, in, in,
For all the springs of futurity.
One, two, three.
[emphasis in original]

Click to read two more poems by Hall: Hours & Mending

*************

Two weeks ago, I posted Ten Movie Images.
This week, the focus is artwork,
including additional creations by Margaret Saucell
and examples in several other mediums by various friends & relatives.

I pulled this collection together when my friend,
artist Michele Tremblay invited me to the week-long
Art in My Own Home Challenge. Thanks Michele!

Day #1:
This beautiful aspect of my house
was painted by my lovely daughter-in-law
interior designer Cathleen Campbell McCartney
Home Is Where the Heart Is

Day #2:
This delicate miniature watercolor
was painted by my talented son Ben McCartney
(age 8 at the time) in 1998 at the
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Summer Camp:
Still Life with Art Supplies

Day #3:
Intricate 3-D String Art, hanging in our study
by my son Sam McCartney

Day #4: watercolor birthday gift by Natasha
Flowers Floating Underwater

Day #5:
Blog - themed presents
from artist Carolyn Rathbun George

Day #6:
Needlework by Gerry's Auntie Margaret

Day #7:
Cardinal Christmas Serenade
by Charles Wysocki
[not a friend or relative!]

Bonus Day:
Seascape, Ocean City, New Jersey
by Gerry McCartney

See also: Ekphrasis by Gerry

******************

Next Fortnightly Post
Thursday, January 28th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT ~ Tapestry or Travesty
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.blogspot.com

Another Gift From Auntie Margaret
When Ben Was Born ~ 1990