Brian Swann

A Drop of Resin

Under sky’s two-faced mirror, past
   coyote pups’ yip yip in the arroyo,

past Do not enter, over barbed wire
   nailed to broken, bleached posts,

climbing the mesa, circling its edge
   in a trail following rock spiral, suns,

sunflowers, quail, mule deer, kokopellis,
   stars everywhere, into rock-cut rooms,

charcoal in corners, corn cobs, and back
   out, soft white dust rising from each step

until stopping at a pine rooted in rock,
   bonsaied by wind and drought, hanging

over the talis, at a needle’s tip one heavy
   sun-filled resin drop which, when I get

down closer, quivering at my breath,
   shakes out peals of chromatics.

Words

            can’t do much by themselves.
They need help to be at least as complete
as a shadow in the grass,
or where
leaves tap against panes like stuff
through dreams, or
where
snow falls one flake at a time
in an erratic down-beat then rises
in a drifting up-draft, or
where
colors linger at the edge of the dark
in a whisper of reeds, or
Where light is
shattered
by my crystal vase
and left entire on the ceiling.

Moth

A shadow flaps. Air wavers in the distance.
On White Man Mountain, maple leaves catch light,
resolving to brightness. In the valley, wind transposes

to bird-calls of broken water and hemlocks are dark’s
subtle body.  At my feet a late rock-flower signs, and pressed
against the screen-door, a luna moth shivers at frost creeping 

ahead of snow swinging small bells over Cator Roundtop, 
down along Bed Hollow whose mountain is freezing above the
peeling white clapboard of the First Old School Baptist chapel 

and settlers’ grave sites unredeemed by sun, beside which the
Red Kill’s ice will soon heave up red earth, toss slabs up and 
about, undermine rocks, slide old field-walls out wider than 

they could hold, as if they had no dimension, the stream rattling 
under ice like dry lily stalks or milkweed pods and the waterfall 
stopping by wind-piled snow boulders will breech like dolphins, 

where a lone junco pings his lost world. But I am here still, 
the world beginning again as stars, spinning out late autumn silence, 
this sole moon moth.

Purgatorial

You can still go down to where doors double back with a forlorn sound
of rusty hinges, squeeze through, the Devil giving you a hand. Inside,
people wander around searching for what they can’t find, stumble about
through deep airless caves, so you could be inside yourself, salt in water,
waiting to precipitate out. You could be in a missing persons bureau
not knowing where to begin, or in snow with no traces to follow,
just scars the wind made. Yet things burn here with a patient lazy glow,
as in an unfurnished room where you glimpse yourself in an ancient
tarnished mirror, walking on cold oilcloth. There are many rooms where God
might be in the gas-fire’s coin-fed flames casting the shadow of, say,
a hippocamp on the wallpaper. His skin, chromium as an early 60s Buick,
would flash and fade as he goes to work filling a great hole in what could be sky.
What falls down we catch between pages and freeze. There’s no moon, only
a reasonable facsimile thereof, opulent with a silence we have no name for.
You know things here by feel, the body disembodied, though a sudden light
might bounce off and illuminate ledges and corners. What works here is tautology,
everything itself and the same. You can use what you can to get back out in front
of yourself, climb out of your reflection to become for a while what you were
before or better, young for ever. But what’s the point among these shards, casques
and caskabells, Tlaloc flayed skins, Gargantuan shadows and thread-like wings, blind
rhyming things that seem to feel at home? Yet somehow it all seems to hold together
as if you could count on it here where the world warps and the weeping wrestler
waves himself goodbye, where the economy, built on luck and speculation, can go
on inflating forever and need never crash, complete the way light is a reflection
of dark and vice versa. And then you emerge, stagger out to a dead horse on moonlit
Belgian blocks in front of Diamond Meat Choice near the piers and trucks, walk on
back into Sapohanikan’s tobacco fields where now the city’s thick with smells
sticky as goo hyenas leave on stalks, and look up in a ginkgo’s broken branches
to see clothing scraps from someone who tried to jump from the plague. Then back
in the basement apartment, you wait for your mother’s death an ocean away,
lonely she rejects company, hungry she rejects food, you read again how the last Delphic
prophetess attempted a trance against her will, the omens being dreadful. A “dumb and
evil spirit” entered her so she stumbled screaming, fell staring straight ahead. Her priests
crept back to find her babbling words no one could understand, and then she died.

Looking on the Bright Side

          Timor mortis conturbat me

The bell for sleep. Panicked, we
split, I one way, me another. Later

I come across him huddled in the
dark wood, catching his breath.

I drag him to his feet. Pull yourself
together, I say. Let’s go. Chin up. 

Look on the bright side. Miles to go.
So we pile up dead branches, set them

on fire, laugh as in the old days, dancing
round and round, until we fall exhausted

as skies darken, rain slips in with carillons,
storm fragments drive through like shrapnel,

and, panicked, we split again, scattering
like grasshoppers before a raging prairie fire.
.

I Follow,

I have no choice. He has me in his mouth.
I can’t see where I’m headed and I don’t mind. If he
drops me off he’ll pick me up later. He can go
anywhere like the Invisible Man, nothing showing or
maybe a bit of pipe or cigar smoke before that too
fades like air in air.
Yes, life’s an adventure with him.
We even visit places that weren’t there before we got there.
And he’s happy most of the time. Me too, particularly
when he rubs a can or bottle and out I pop like a genie:
Where are we going today, Master?
Sometimes, though,
things can go a bit off-kilter, especially when I get ahead
of myself and think I know best. The mistakes I make!
But even then he looks out for me, like the hugging and loving
bed-fellow he is.
Sure, he can be nasty too. You were nothing
before me, he’ll say, and it’s true. He tells me things I could
never have thought myself. If he lies a bit, how would I know?
He plays close to the vest. Now and then, though, when I think
he thinks I’m not listening, he’ll whisper, I am lonely, lonely,
I am best so. But no, the trickster. Gotcha! he’ll crow. Just kiddin’, kid.
There’s more where that came from. Here! I run over—poof!
A pop, a crackle, a few greasy black smears or marks like those
they find when someone spontaneously combusts. I scrape them up.
You never know, they might come in handy.

Brian Swann has published 14 poetry collections, the most recent, Imago, with Johns Hopkins University Press last year. And MadHat Press has just published YA-HONK! GOES THE WILD GANDER (2024), a collection of prose pieces that Swann refers to as “covid divigations.”