Douglas Browning: Poetry

Here are some poems of mine.  I will substitute a different poem every so often and without warning. Each poem included is copyrighted under my name, so any reproduction of it requires my permission (which is not necessarily very difficult to get.

A Slow Dying

April and depth of many greens
startles her awake and bird songs
breaking her out from classroom dreams,
depth of water, silvery water-wings
and the fading out of other fading things.

Awakening is pain in spite of it,
escaping the long and nightly chains,
to now another day lengthening out
to watering, bacon, other whims,
April's green stagnation, wind chimes.

Awake and he beside her unawake.
She touches his hair, looks back to when
he kissed her ear, earthquake struck,
and sleet meant nothing and the icy wind
vain at loving waters warmly spent.

And all the children she whispered then
like silent stumps I swam towards
drowning and couldn't . . . She didn't waken him.
Bacon frying did. And greenly afterwards
birds gone, sun rising without words.

It's a slow dying, day after day's night
school rooms haunting her tossing dreams
and the birds singing away her silent heat
singing away her useless water-wings
songs fading into sun and other fading things.

Woman Poem

It wasn't like that.
Dreams faded into others,
freezing rain confined her
inside his absent hours.

Her thought went elsewhere,
watering house-pent plants,
making soups, standing still
at the window looking out.

And when he left her there,
her arms across her breast,
her lips tight, eyes dim,
she took a place in town

with two rooms and kitchen,
small kitchen, third floor,
confining as her life had been
with houseplants she had saved.

One bedding, then another
confined her more and so
she stood when summer came
another window looking down

and saw him laughing there
invading her with sudden
hunger to scream in harmony
and cast herself in space.

His eyes swept up to her
drawn by what he thought
her frailty bent to do,
scrambling had her in his arms.

Strangely met and now begun
cold winters, fresh springs
some of her house plants died
and she began again again.

 

Truth

Was it in the night
the key was turned
that made our twinings
sacrosanct?

And was it under
the morning sun
you played those binding's
mountebank?

No matter, darling.
How paler falls
a drear daylight's ap
ostasy

upon a candle's
devotionals
and one bright night's in
sistency.

Thunderstorm

There. A horizon of rain.
Barely dry weeds here
and I compel a traction
among them, pulling hard at
dark thunder and harsh wind.

Shamelessly she squats
taunting me with absence,
her thirsty upturned mouth,
taut legs and tittering sparks,
dark thunder and harsh wind.

Come to me, wash over me,
bathe me with your bright
precipitate and taste, your
reckless whirl among
dark thunder and harsh wind.

I wait. Doesn't she feel me,
my hurt for her! She draws away
tempting another lover with
laden breasts and stormy tresses,
dark thunder and harsh wind.

Lament her flight? Not ever.
I always don't. Once more alone
hugging myself in dry weeds,
I smile at the distancing
dark thunder and harsh wind.

No matter. In time another
feral love will loom and I
will wait in this cracked land
for a morrow's witchery of
dark thunder and harsh rain.

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