Poems
X
We’ll have to shear off the tops of those trees
if they continue to block my view
of the mountain. Not only our trees
but the neighbors’ as well. Find some
daredevil to fly a helicopter upside
down over the neighborhood
and give it a good haircut.
It’s America, people will do anything.
And my sightline is sacrosanct.
I need to see that peak floating
like Fuji, not just know it’s there.
So I can orient my immaterial
longings, my desire to transcend
earthly limitations. I can’t be
expected to pray to something
half obscured by these lesser gods
etching themselves into the evening air,
performing their fantastic
collaborations with the wind, keeping
or dropping their needles or leaves,
subject as they are to time and change.
What can they teach me about how to be?
--from No Day at the Beach; first published in The Manhattan Review
Sightlines
We’ll have to shear off the tops of those trees
if they continue to block my view
of the mountain. Not only our trees
but the neighbors’ as well. Find some
daredevil to fly a helicopter upside
down over the neighborhood
and give it a good haircut.
It’s America, people will do anything.
And my sightline is sacrosanct.
I need to see that peak floating
like Fuji, not just know it’s there.
So I can orient my immaterial
longings, my desire to transcend
earthly limitations. I can’t be
expected to pray to something
half obscured by these lesser gods
etching themselves into the evening air,
performing their fantastic
collaborations with the wind, keeping
or dropping their needles or leaves,
subject as they are to time and change.
What can they teach me about how to be?
--from No Day at the Beach; first published in The Manhattan Review
X
X
It’s no day at the beach
being me, I said.
It’s no walk
in the park.
I can see that,
she said.
Trust me, I said.
It’s no picnic.
Clearly, she said.
What’s that
supposed
to mean? I said.
I’m just agreeing
with you, she
said. You might
have argued
a bit, I said. Tried
to convince me
otherwise.
Who knows,
maybe it is
a day at the beach
being me. Or
maybe it’s a day
at the beach
being with me.
No, she said. It’s not.
--from No Day at the Beach; first published in The Sun
No Day at the Beach
It’s no day at the beach
being me, I said.
It’s no walk
in the park.
I can see that,
she said.
Trust me, I said.
It’s no picnic.
Clearly, she said.
What’s that
supposed
to mean? I said.
I’m just agreeing
with you, she
said. You might
have argued
a bit, I said. Tried
to convince me
otherwise.
Who knows,
maybe it is
a day at the beach
being me. Or
maybe it’s a day
at the beach
being with me.
No, she said. It’s not.
--from No Day at the Beach; first published in The Sun
X
X
Early fall, the light thin and brittle, and if
it’s true that deprivation is a gift,
I accept the gift. I walk down
to Wallace Park to watch the swifts
that roost every September
in the Chapman School’s tall
brick chimney. The charming swifts
with their long, forked tails
and swept-back wings,
ten thousand of them swerving
and darting in the evening sky,
a flowing, expandable spiral
of birds, clearing the air of insects
and riveting the wandering
human mind. Tonight there must be
three hundred spectators,
a whole hillside of us, ordinary people
whose wings fell off eons ago,
who traded flight for speech
and have regretted it ever since,
sodden and earthbound as we are,
except for our lifted eyes, our oohs and ahs
that show we’re still alive when
the peregrine falcon dives in
and knifes one out of the air,
which we boo or cheer,
sometimes simultaneously.
We love this passion play of form
and formlessness,
the birds’ shifting patterns
flung out like a whiplash of water
or school of fish above
the stationary human school,
then drawn tight together,
a miracle they don’t crash into each other,
a miracle of echolocation, until
you see them as they truly are:
a single organism, a body made mostly
of air and quick decisions, jagged
motions that gradually cohere—
a poem, in other words.
It takes the flock a full twenty minutes
to funnel down into the chimney,
and it seems a living smoke
pulled back into a still and sleeping fire,
so beautiful I forget for a moment
my father’s death, or I turn my mind
away from it or, no, I open
my grief to accommodate this wonder
and wonder what he might have thought of it,
were we standing here together,
the kind of thing we never did, and now
will never do, except in my imagination—
that unchanging inner sky where the swifts
take flight whenever I want them to
and my father cannot die.
--from No Day at the Beach; first published in The Gettysburg Review
Swifts
For my fatherEarly fall, the light thin and brittle, and if
it’s true that deprivation is a gift,
I accept the gift. I walk down
to Wallace Park to watch the swifts
that roost every September
in the Chapman School’s tall
brick chimney. The charming swifts
with their long, forked tails
and swept-back wings,
ten thousand of them swerving
and darting in the evening sky,
a flowing, expandable spiral
of birds, clearing the air of insects
and riveting the wandering
human mind. Tonight there must be
three hundred spectators,
a whole hillside of us, ordinary people
whose wings fell off eons ago,
who traded flight for speech
and have regretted it ever since,
sodden and earthbound as we are,
except for our lifted eyes, our oohs and ahs
that show we’re still alive when
the peregrine falcon dives in
and knifes one out of the air,
which we boo or cheer,
sometimes simultaneously.
We love this passion play of form
and formlessness,
the birds’ shifting patterns
flung out like a whiplash of water
or school of fish above
the stationary human school,
then drawn tight together,
a miracle they don’t crash into each other,
a miracle of echolocation, until
you see them as they truly are:
a single organism, a body made mostly
of air and quick decisions, jagged
motions that gradually cohere—
a poem, in other words.
It takes the flock a full twenty minutes
to funnel down into the chimney,
and it seems a living smoke
pulled back into a still and sleeping fire,
so beautiful I forget for a moment
my father’s death, or I turn my mind
away from it or, no, I open
my grief to accommodate this wonder
and wonder what he might have thought of it,
were we standing here together,
the kind of thing we never did, and now
will never do, except in my imagination—
that unchanging inner sky where the swifts
take flight whenever I want them to
and my father cannot die.
--from No Day at the Beach; first published in The Gettysburg Review
X
X
I’m so wildly unprolific, the poems
I have not written would reach
from here to the California coast
if you laid them end to end.
And if you stacked them up,
the poems I have not written
would sway like a silent
Tower of Babel, saying nothing
and everything in a thousand
different tongues. So moving, so
filled with and emptied of suffering,
so steeped in the music of a voice
speechless before the truth,
the poems I have not written
would break the hearts of every
woman who’s ever left me,
make them eye their husbands
with a sharp contempt and hate
themselves for turning their backs
on the very source of beauty.
The poems I have not written
would compel all other poets
to ask of God: "Why do you
let me live? I am worthless.
please strike me dead at once,
destroy my works and cleanse
the earth of all my ghastly
imperfections." Trees would
bow their heads before the poems
I have not written. "Take me,"
they would say, "and turn me
into your pages so that I
might live forever as the ground
from which your words arise."
The wind itself, about which
I might have written so eloquently,
praising its slick and intersecting
rivers of air, its stately calms
and furious interrogations,
its flutelike lingerings and passionate
reproofs, would divert its course
to sweep down and then pass over
the poems I have not written,
and the life I have not lived, the life
I’ve failed even to imagine,
which they so perfectly describe.
--from Sea of Faith; first published in The Southern Review
The Poems I Have Not Written
I’m so wildly unprolific, the poems
I have not written would reach
from here to the California coast
if you laid them end to end.
And if you stacked them up,
the poems I have not written
would sway like a silent
Tower of Babel, saying nothing
and everything in a thousand
different tongues. So moving, so
filled with and emptied of suffering,
so steeped in the music of a voice
speechless before the truth,
the poems I have not written
would break the hearts of every
woman who’s ever left me,
make them eye their husbands
with a sharp contempt and hate
themselves for turning their backs
on the very source of beauty.
The poems I have not written
would compel all other poets
to ask of God: "Why do you
let me live? I am worthless.
please strike me dead at once,
destroy my works and cleanse
the earth of all my ghastly
imperfections." Trees would
bow their heads before the poems
I have not written. "Take me,"
they would say, "and turn me
into your pages so that I
might live forever as the ground
from which your words arise."
The wind itself, about which
I might have written so eloquently,
praising its slick and intersecting
rivers of air, its stately calms
and furious interrogations,
its flutelike lingerings and passionate
reproofs, would divert its course
to sweep down and then pass over
the poems I have not written,
and the life I have not lived, the life
I’ve failed even to imagine,
which they so perfectly describe.
--from Sea of Faith; first published in The Southern Review
X
X
Strange tubas in my ears and the fat
yellow light lolling across
the boardwalk doesn’t
exactly help and of course
elephants lumbering
through one’s thoughts
remembering where they
must go to die is not
the pleasantest of situations
either and the ocean
what can you say about it?
It hardly knows itself
but there it is the one
and the many waves all doing
whatever waves do, lapping
doggedly at the shore,
making a splash, lending
themselves unwisely
to human metaphor
the whole earth meanwhile
spinning through space
like a basketball on the tip
of an idle god’s finger.
People stroll by eating
hot dogs, heroes, corn-
on-the-cob, wildly purple
burst of cotton candy
and other members
of the colorful, hard-
to-believe food groups.
Well, some of us do a pretty
decent job of amusing ourselves
here where the land
meets the sea and music
empties the air
of silence. This is what
we crawled up out of
four hundred million years ago,
and this is what
we’ve become now that
we’ve dried ourselves off.
Creatures so fearful
of death we’ll actually
get on a rollercoaster
just to calm ourselves down.
This is the much needed
transfusion of the outer
to the inner world.
Elephants, tubas, fat light
falling across the bathers
asleep on the shore
of the Atlantic Ocean.
Their children splashing
Each other in the freezing water.
--from Sea of Faith; first published in Poetry
At Coney Island
Strange tubas in my ears and the fat
yellow light lolling across
the boardwalk doesn’t
exactly help and of course
elephants lumbering
through one’s thoughts
remembering where they
must go to die is not
the pleasantest of situations
either and the ocean
what can you say about it?
It hardly knows itself
but there it is the one
and the many waves all doing
whatever waves do, lapping
doggedly at the shore,
making a splash, lending
themselves unwisely
to human metaphor
the whole earth meanwhile
spinning through space
like a basketball on the tip
of an idle god’s finger.
People stroll by eating
hot dogs, heroes, corn-
on-the-cob, wildly purple
burst of cotton candy
and other members
of the colorful, hard-
to-believe food groups.
Well, some of us do a pretty
decent job of amusing ourselves
here where the land
meets the sea and music
empties the air
of silence. This is what
we crawled up out of
four hundred million years ago,
and this is what
we’ve become now that
we’ve dried ourselves off.
Creatures so fearful
of death we’ll actually
get on a rollercoaster
just to calm ourselves down.
This is the much needed
transfusion of the outer
to the inner world.
Elephants, tubas, fat light
falling across the bathers
asleep on the shore
of the Atlantic Ocean.
Their children splashing
Each other in the freezing water.
--from Sea of Faith; first published in Poetry
X
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About
John Brehm was born and raised in Lincoln, Nebraska and educated at the University of Nebraska and Cornell University. He is the author of three full-length books of poetry, Sea of Faith, Help Is on the Way, and No Day at the Beach, all from the University of Wisconsin Press, and a chapbook, The Way Water Moves, from Flume Press. His collection of essays, The Dharma of Poetry, was recently released by Wisdom Publications and is a companion to his acclaimed anthology, The Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy, also from Wisdom Publications. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, The Sun, The Southern Review, Plume, Gulf Coast, The Missouri Review, New Ohio Review, The Writer’s Almanac, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, The Best American Poetry, The Norton Introduction to Literature, and many other journals and anthologies.