Fleda Brown Biography

I count nineteen white blossoms
which would not be
visible except for
...

We dressed for church. I had a white hat
and white gloves when I was fifteen, no joke.
You had to do that to show God you cared.

God's eyes were stained glass, and his voice
was pipe organ. He was immortal, invisible,
while my panty-hose itched and my atheist

father chewed his tongue and threatened to run
out the door but didn't for my mother's sake,
and she swallowed her fate, this marriage,

like a communion cracker, and my brain-
damaged brother lurched around the church
nursery, and my sweeter sister watched me

with huge brown eyes to see what I'd do next.
My God, why did I turn my eyes upward when
we were all there, then, in the flesh? I am so

sorry about God, sorry we fastened that word
to the sky. God's not even legal in Hebrew.
If you get the vowel caught between the two

consonants of your lips, it can carry you
dangerously up like a balloon over what you'd
give anything to be in the middle of, now.
...

FOR

'I'm leaving you,' she said, 'for you make me sick.' But
of course she didn't say that. She thought the 'for'; she admired
its elegant distance, the way it's wedged like an iron strut
between result and cause, the way it's almost 'far,' and dire

as a raised eyebrow. She liked the way it sounds like speaking
through a cardboard paper towel tube, using it for a megaphone:
not loud, but strong, all those compacted years shoving
out the other end, as if she were certain she wanted to be alone.

OR

The first four bars of Beethoven's sixth, the Pastorale,
repeat and repeat, always with variation: or, and or,
something to violate expectations, not fully antiphonal,
only an oar dipped into the measure to make an interior

swirl, pulling the craft slightly to the side, yet ahead,
still: little cupped trails alongside to mark where
the mind turned, questions were asked, and shed,
before moving on, nothing that can't be repaired.

NOR

As a flower sheds petal after petal, as further tests
strip away one after another of the last hopes for a cure,
as a person shakes into the waste bin all her cigarettes
and goes down the street not knowing who she is, the pure

air of saints is achieved by abandonment: Jesus in the garden
alone, cold moon disappearing, Buddha at the morning star,
mind emptied of its snarl of ignorance. Neither to harden
against loss, nor to welcome it. To let it be who you are.
...

Dear friend, you were right: the smell of fish and foam
and algae makes one green smell together. It clears
my head. It empties me enough to fit down in my own

skin for a while, singleminded as a surfer. The first
day here, there was nobody, from one distance
to the other. Rain rose from the waves like steam,

dark lifted off the dark. All I could think of
were hymns, all I knew the words to: the oldest
motions tuning up in me. There was a horseshoe crab

shell, a translucent egg sack, a log of a tired jetty,
and another, and another. I walked miles, holding
my suffering deeply and courteously, as if I were holding

a package for somebody else who would come back
like sunlight. In the morning, the boardwalk opened
wide and white with sun, gulls on one leg in the slicks.

Cold waves, cold air, and people out in heavy coats,
arm in arm along the sheen of waves. A single boy
in shorts rode his skimboard out thigh-high, making

intricate moves across the March ice-water. I thought
he must be painfully cold, but, I hear you say, he had
all the world emptied, to practice his smooth stand.
...

Unless there is a loon cry in a book, the poetry has gone out of it. - Carl Sandburg

Three loons appear in this poem, twoon one side of the canoe, oneon the other, but

not stable. One drops downto nothing, emerges two minutes latertwenty feet away, quavering

his black beak's cold criesacross us to the others like a naturalbridge: oo-AH-hoo. Three loon cries

arise in this poemfrom a hollow carved outof itself, the slosh of what it says

to itself, not to us.We four in the canoe sitin the open AH, riding low as loons.

No one knows who feels what, or how much. The grievingsyllables lie over us, untouchable

oo-AH-hoo, yodeledoo-AH-hoo. Oh Lord, if we knewwhat we can take from each other, and what

we have to leave alone,if we knew which maniacal divesthe universe was thinking of all along.
...