Russell Brickey
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Night Willow
A few stars glamour past
the night glare of the houses.
Leafs close as the air
cools, and the tangled shoots
thrive minutely—
In the fulcrum of branches,
insects scuttle from the earth,
an alien kingdom,
full of hunger. Aggregate
eyes glint like drops
of water. A fleshy wet
fold shrugs beneath a spiral
shell. There is something
wrong in the way the milk
of their leavings coats
the florid recess as
the light glints down
through this matrix of willow.
This world has an
intelligence which is
not ours.
The Plague
Small dark double muscular
shapes that hop thumpishly
at night: mating frogs, locked
in an expressionless fuck.
The spawn of frogs, the mechanics
of biology, not yet ready to sing—
they give birthdots that come alive,
unroll to commas that curl
question marks flicking into exclamation
as they flee the light.
An alleycat hunches suspended
on the fence, a million angry
miles in her yellow stare.
A bat flicks past the lawn.
Later on a wind will blow & tatter
the weeds against the splintery fence,
the little dog locked in the neighborhood
will yowl, lonely & harmless, as a car alarm
barks on and on. But for now
it is the kingdom of the spawn
with their quiet, humping, croakish, lumpish ways.
I love the moon
hanging on the streetlights.
It is stained like an old bathroom sink.
for tonight alone the world is as it should be:
the lords are all in abeyance
& the meek have inherited the Earth.
The Sky
There is a fence and a chair with the sun
Broiling down from space and an old house peeling
Whatever color age and despair leave
Behind. Whoever thought the world would turn
Out differently didn’t look hard
Into this light. The grass grows long
Over the cloudy face of the mason jar. Soft
Decay blooms like a rose in its old garments
Loomed from paper plates, beer cans, husky compost and
Yielding flowers that heap their colors beside the tangled
Vines running end to end in the fields.
There is a woman, sitting, crying into her hand,
And a man in a dirty jacket standing by the rusted skull of a car.
He strikes the hood with an old tobacco
Tin, rings the dull metal though he is weak as
A clump of the smudged muddy grass, empty and old
And dry as a gully. But the force
Is one of rage loading and unloading,
And its dull bell chimes across the fields.
You don’t see the woman move. You see
The filaments of her hair lank from the weight of day
Hanging like fiber-optics in the sun. You see the wasted
Tires stumped on the porch. You see the old dryer
With its pools and weaves of rust, the mold
Eating a furry wave along the eaves, a dull
Ebb and flow overtaking the wild design.
A window pane looks out as fast as you look in
And slivers blades of noon from the light.
You see the man as he yells something, turns
His heavy back to the woman, toward
The street and the blank, upended moon of day
Hung like a blister above clouds so dim
They seem to be on the other side of
The sky. The sky bright and haze-washed with
Watershed summer. Then, as if by a glint of the sun itself,
A miracle of no more than fifteen
Appears, flashes in that rare instant
Of young muscle, sinew, and nerve, flashes
On his ancient 10-speed and meets the eye of the man,
Who yells: “What’re ya lookin’ at, Punk?”
And the boy, without even turning
His head, yells back: “A fat sack
Of shit and air and nada, papa!” And the man is struck dumbfounded
By such white rage that the day begins to roar between his ears,
And he glows hot as an ingot in the furnace sun
And is unable to move.
Who knows what
Might happen in this moment? She might break
Free with her broken wing trailing over the barbed wire
And across the fields, across the days of
Waiting, and he would never catch her. Never.
Or the man could meet the boy and vent his cosmic splay of violence,
The galaxy of black holes and red giants that make up his old, old rage.
Or the boy could meet the man with the dark metal
Of his tire pump, darken both their moons and
Take them both home. And the luck of the matter
Would be—only—fighting the drunken relatives
For the right of the will; the property;
The house with its worthless bed of ragweed.
Or it could come surprisingly from her own
Unmoving hand, held empty for so long.
The hoe standing by the white wall.
The jagged bottle neck choking in pungent grass.
The new red smile of blacker days to come,
Freeing not herself, not the body used up,
Bruised past reproduction or even joy,
But some thing greater, like the shape
Of some dark form rising on the horizon, dark
And whirling like a tornado, a vortex
Scorched by the sun and so distant it seems
To exist with the clouds on the far side
Of the air-blue sky: the shape of enraged starving hope…
But none of this happens. Not at all.
You knew none of it would.
The man breaks free, suddenly, and huffs down
The brittle grass yelling, “Fuck!” “Punk!” “Shit!”
The air swarms with his words, an explosion of deep hornets,
His hate rising as if on crinkling waves of metalic air,
Like bottled-up, pent-up, swept-up life: a genie tortured in a bottle.
Asphalt heat swirls up with haze and hay-fever.
But the boy is only an upright blade
Of speed running between the fields,
A spark upon the glare of distance. And the far off
Violent old man must stand, spent and reddened,
Impotent as his rage flies down the road.
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Russell Brickey's poetry can be seen online in Eunioa Review, Thick With Conviction, Miller's Pond, Mobius, Drown in my Own Fears, and in numerous print journals. He has a chapbook (Cold War Evening News) out from Kelsay Books, a chapbook forthcoming from Spuyten Duyvil Press (He Knows What a Stick Is), and a full length collection (Atomic Atoll) forthcoming from Wild Leaf Press. He holds an MFA from Purdue University. Now living in the Midwest, he misses the mountains and beaches of his native Oregon.