The Wall Arch falls in Utah
after spending tens of thousands of years
holding itself up against erosion.

A locust tree falls in Gettysburg
after one hundred and fifty years
of holding itself up against
bullets and cannonballs and blood, after
holding itself close to Lincoln
as he spoke there.

The poet Shannon Leigh falls into dark water,
holding herself against the need
to see her life through
once she knew that it had been enough
to live as strongly as she had.

Ken Hunt falls, Angela Boyce falls,
Pat Storm falls, Lisa King falls, Scott
Kirkpatrick falls.

Some days it seems that everything is falling.
All the poets are falling, all the natural wonders
I’ve known are tumbling down head over sole
leaving me with more answers than questions
than I was willing to ask when they were still among us,
upright, appearing as if they would never die;

and now Mahmoud Darwish falls as Palestine falls, years
of people crushed, starved, burned;
people fall in olive groves and fail in shanty towns,
raising his words against their dim future
in order to recall
how things can change
even when they seem most
immutable.

In the August night I stop for a moment to say
that I fear I am no arch, no witness tree,
no name others will use to conjure hope after I’m gone.
The ground itself shakes me into terror daily
as I look at the way I live, the way I have lived:
coward, passer-by, content more often
to marvel at the courage of others
and the endurance of the Earth
than I have been to pull my own bravery out
and try it on;

set-up more often than punchline,
killer more often than savior, mayhem in my voice
more often than healing; give me strength, I have said,
give me strength to be the rock that doesn’t crumble —
forgetting that to crumble is the way of all things,
and that what endures is not the thing itself
but its spirit, its flavor carried forward
on the wind of the planet.

I am no hero, not in this life.
I am no wonder
worth seeing, not today.

But things can change.

Desmond Dekker playing hard
and losing
to the rowdy river,
white and high
from the earlier rain.

Snapping flames in the fire pit
as particle board burns.
Kerosene lanterns in the trees.

Sweet smoke in the cool, damp air.

A quick old hippie with odd teeth
talks non stop of how he trims
and cleans the trails for a mile
up and down the riverbank on his side.
Talks of finding foxfire at night
in the decomposed logs carried here
by the spring thaw. Imagines the cavemen
finding it, saying, “It glows.
I’m going to lick it!”

He cackles on
about black snakes
developing intelligence based on years
around people, says the big ones
are the smartest because they’ve learned
the most about how to get along.
Knows all the best fishing spots
and is willing to share that with anyone
because it shouldn’t be private knowledge.

There are blackberries back up in there, he says,
that have never seen pesticide and are bigger
than his thumb.

Something invisible
is moving on the opposite shore,
but I keep my mouth shut:

stories like these
haven’t been heard
in a long time,
and they deserve
to be heard again
beginning to end,
with no interruption,
on a riverbank
in Attawaugan, Connecticut,
with “The Israelites”
in the background,
almost drowned out
by the sound of flood water
pouring over an old dam
as if it wasn’t there.

Living the blue, the green,
the art-colored life: it sticks to you,
that soft mold of
satisfaction as you emote,
create; happy with the way
it holds you and seals you
from thinking about what
you’re not doing.

Wrapped in it, you barely notice
the smell of decay. The bills
pile up, the phone calls remain
unanswered, and you’re fat and happy
inside the fuzzy rot you’re carrying
everywhere with you.

You tell yourself:
how bad can it be
when they make
penicillin from this stuff?
Sick people get well
on the essence, after all,
and you’re not sick right now,
with your hands
sculpting the air
into fancy shapes.

The power’s off. The gas is off,
the cable’s near termination,
but you’re fine.
You sit and imagine
that everything you touch
is safe from
infection.

You can’t breathe, but
you don’t know how anymore
so you don’t miss it, really.

The last war ended
with a distant explosion
that was all but unheard
but caused a ripple on the surface
of a puddle of grimy water
in a bomb crater.

We all crawled out
of our holes,
blinking, unbelieving
under a perfect sky.

Then we went to look for food,
keeping an eye on each other
to make sure we were all going to share
anything we found.

People, lately,
have developed a bad habit
of walking into churches
to kill other people,

which (I suppose)
is the natural evolution
of several thousand years
of people walking out of churches

to kill other people. Of course
it’s a bad thing so
no wringing of hands
is strictly necessary, although

(as is true of the killing)
we’ll do it anyway, even though
we get into that “us vs. them” thing
when we do, with our sad fingers

pointing outward while our trigger fingers
itch in sympathy, if not (at least to our hopeful minds)
solidarity. You have to wonder (or at least
I do) if the problem is really in the churches

or in us when people (not all people, of course,
it’s never “all people” when we talk of this)
put so much faith in the ability of
the God of the gun to bring peace

that the God of the hymns is relegated to
providing the soundtrack to the crusade.
For instance, in one of those violated churches
they have a song that goes,

“come down peace, come down peace,
let peace come down and surround us.”
On the news this morning a man, survivor of the killing,
wipes his eyes and says, “It’s gonna be hard

to sing that now,” and of course it’s always hard
(I know, I know how hard it is myself, for I have wanted
more times than I should count to bring my own pain
upon those who bring me pain)

to sing that, to wish for Something
to come down and bring a blanket to smother
our fire as it consumes us, but it’s harder now to sing it
as people (not our people, we know

it’s never our people) are reloading, adding fuel
to pyres, blaming people (other people,
not our people, it’s always other people)
for bringing the fire upon themselves

in the first place because God (our God,
or perhaps some other God, we can never quite
put our fingers on that God) isn’t in the church
where the fire came down in place of the desired peace.

When the fire came down this time people were singing,
“the sun will come out tomorrow, tomorrow…”
and maybe it will, we hope it will; a sun
to cover all of us (all people, all people

who walk beneath that sun) in something that
resembles peace. Until it does we’ve got
just three things to remind us of what we claim to want:
we’ve got churches, we’ve got people,

we’ve got a God who may not live in any church
if the death toll that comes from churches is any
indication, although I’m sure God stops in there
from time to time just as we do;

a God who sometimes appears deaf and blind, who
may not know much of peace at all (if we are the measure
of peace), who holds the blanket high above us
(perhaps to block the sight of all this)

and waits for us to call for it before letting it fall.
We are so hoarse from shouting at people
(other people, all the other people) who seem to feel
that the road through death is the only path we truly share

that when we sing (why must we sing
so hard? why is it so hard for us to just sing?)
we don’t believe it’s singing (but it is). Let peace
come down and surround us. Tomorrow. Tomorrow (if not today).

10:00 AM:
Kid, you can’t rely on clever
because clever only gets you so far:
from sophomore homeroom pranks
to your first college party at most. After that,
clever becomes desperate and winds up
believing that “Waking Life”
is a good movie because
clever got laid once
after watching it.

10:30 AM:
You? You shouldn’t rely so much on earnest.
Earnest will only lead you
to protest rallies and long nights debating
what “emo” means with people
you would really rather be kissing.

11:00 AM:
You should try to develop
some mad skills and become pretty
because
pretty helps and is all about
the mad skills; there are beautiful children
no one ever notices who would be pretty
if they just developed their mad skills.
It’s not pretty
that I know this,
and not pretty that it’s true,
but it’s true.

11:30 AM:
You’re doomed.

11:40 AM:
You’re going to be fine
in spite of what I say.

12:15 PM:
You would make a fine
guidance counselor.
Lucky you.

1:30 PM:
I don’t know what to tell
you.

There are times when
I can remember what I am
supposed to be doing here
when I speak to you,
and I hate you for that.

2:30 PM:
Joy, and spirit, and service.
God love you.
May you one day forget
I ever existed.

Blue is the swing
of my lips from side to side
as I frown and frown
at what we’ve done.

Blue is the color of me
whistling past the graveyard
I have made of my home.

Blue is the shade
of our impotent
disapproval.

Blue is the wing
of a thunderbird
caught above us
in the smoggy answer
to the question,
“What have you done
for me lately?” Blue
is the laughter of
triumphant myth
righting itself.

Blue, the sky’s blue,
deepens as the earth imagines
itself healed, patient again
with our dwindling presence.

Blue, goodnight blue, kissing us
good bye, glad to see us go.

Blue is the color of our absence.
Blue is the fact of it happening.

Blue is the way we used to think
heaven would be, and blue is heaven
without us.

give them up

take them out of your bag
and hang them up to dry
and die

we need the dance of good and bad
with all its twists and feints
to be shown to us as a chart
of small and long steps
that march back and forth
to a beat that drags and then speeds up
for that is the one way
we will learn it
and then we can work
to try and make it smooth
and straight

we need the arc of love
to be drawn in dots and lines
that curve and halt
roll and drop back
so that we can take hold
of the long view
and not be slaves
to the past wreck of any one time
when it did not come out as we
had planned

give up
your rotted
flowered and sickly fragrant
overextended vocabulary
your
adoration of complication
in pursuit of explication
of creation’s obfuscation

phew!

it is all just so much spit on the tongue

this world you claim to know
so well you can write of it
is not the world
we were asked to show
for all to see and hang
upon

the rules that say
it must be so are
too glib to be true

you have lost the thread
of how we were meant to run
this race
have made a choice
to paint your names
in truth’s place
and made them
ten times the size
of what is in fact there

a word to the wise
is all we need
wise words are small words
keys
for locks
not made for codes and
traps

so
give the huge words up
and be brief when you sit
with pen to page

live for the short road
and for praise
of what is found
when the Big Words
are cut down
to size

NOTE: Rough recording of this up on Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/poetrybytonybrown

A certain part of a man’s body
walks the street looking for the blue pills.
There’s a storefront on Water Street
that’s supposed to have them
but he’s not sure of the address
so he goes into several before he finds
the one he wants and buys a pack
from the certain part of a woman’s body
behind the counter.

Certain parts of men’s and women’s bodies
crowd the night streets around the club district
where the exchange has taken place.
It’s party night, party hour.
The parties of the first part
merge with their counterparts on the sidewalks, in the bars
and parking lots. It’s all so exciting,
with the undercurrent
of deception, the blue pills everywhere,
the gels,
the creams
and implants.

Meanwhile, all over the city,
men and women
whose parts have strayed
stir uneasily
in front of the blue fire
of their televisions.
Smiling, whole bodies
keep telling them
something is missing.
Even when they know better,
they cannot sleep.
If it’s not too late,
they may head
to Water Street
themselves, having
a long look around
for themselves.

All that any of us truly know
of death

is that in the face of it, we can rely
on the sight of a peach tree

split black and rotten from top to bottom with
almost every one of the branches dry and cracked,

and on how upon the few remaining green arms
are handfuls of fruits waiting to ripen.

I’m a tiny animal,
just one of trillions
(but who’s counting?)
who really own the world.
We’ve been here
just shy of forever
and the one thing I can tell you
about people is this:
they are good real estate.
You have to love them
with their migrations and
their filth. I know
they’re sure
that when we move in
we’re some kind of God thing,
but honestly? They
don’t get it: we aren’t trying
to do anything but get by, reproduce,
suck up what we need to live. God
has had very little to say to us
ever since he gave up on the
real estate market. His money
is in commodity futures. He leaves
the hard wet work to us: the homesteading,
the improvements, the clear cutting.
God doesn’t send us, he just
depends on us. We build where we want
and he banks on the results.

I’d say
it’s like one hand
washing the other,
but somehow,
that doesn’t seem right.

Dennis has got a picture
to show us:
ears he cut from dead VC
in the Mekong Delta.
Like dried apricots,
they’re lined up neatly
in the shoebox
he keeps them in.

One ear from each kill,
Dennis, or
did you take two?

He laughs and winks.
I had a lot of fun over there,
he says.

We sit next to each other in
Urban Studies. He and the professor
get along well and he has a grasp
of some of the nuances of the evolution
of cities that is admirable.

Right now, we’re stoned
out of our gourds
after a lunchtime drive.

No one will sit near us when we’re like this,
when I’m sitting looking at Dennis’ picture
of the apricots in the box, when I
an trying to imagine
how it must have been, amazed at the fact
that this was permitted,
that men who were permitted
to do these things walk among us
with their children and their insights
into the way civilization grows.

Wow, I say.
I want to hear more,
I say, and y’know,
I’m hungry, I say.

Let’s get a burger,
says Dennis.
And we do.

I may have no choice
but to lie to my skin
and try to convince it that
the million flinches and itches
it is feeling are not reflective
of a restlessness within,

but are the marks of small assaults
from outside the perimeter. I will say,

we are under attack
by everything.

This will work,
I think, if I can keep my skin
from looking into my eyes.
My eyes won’t ever back me up.

I refuse to be daunted by this.
Lying to my skin, closing my eyes,
I’m going to beat this —

allowing the forces colliding among my organs
to roam and smash me awake again and again,
all the while pretending peace reigns there

while the black night closes in and seeks weakness,
breaches, the stray mutinous hair that will fall from me
leaving one follicle open to a manufactured danger
on which I can blame everything.

no one can say
if this is exactly how it happens
but we know it is true:

you are born dumb
but you will learn someday
that something ancient exists
that is yours,
that was made
for you.

you may be a child upon its arrival,

or you may find it
later, stroking
your own child’s head
as he lies in a fever.
cooling his skin
with compresses
while you recognize
the presence standing by the door,
you may be moved to chant
the long story:

there is a dance
for it in every lost village.
there is an arrowhead somewhere,
a million years old,
that was chipped
by a tiny, tufted thing —
barely a human at all —
that stone
was its first home
and now, you hold the deed.

there is something ancient
that was made for you. in order
to preserve itself it chooses you
in the place you are most ready
to receive it. it lives because
you live, because we live…

we don’t know how it happens.
this is just the way it is.