Cory Brown

Ithaca College
cbrown@ithaca.edu

First Communion

 

Another guest has departed and we are left
with the backdrop of another day,
left to carry out the remains of July.
One or two days strung out before the clouds
clear and we can begin to see the sun again
in a new light; cicadas’ buzzes imminent,
not yet salient to the ear, but expected enough
for me to hear them in the mind. I raise
my screen to get a better view of the lake,
cornflowers and day lilies in the hazy,
muggy afternoon–as if an unimpeded view
of the outdoors could offer me
something I hadn’t seen or heard before.
All for the purpose of giving me
that little extra umpf of inspiration
like a good cup of strong Vienna-roast.
And here I’ve come again to see if I can
make that seminal commentary, that communal
graft which both describes and sets the stage
for what is to be described later,
when hummingbirds and helicopter leaves
are just an image from the past and yet
a vision of what is to come. Like seeing
the still lake from far away, such as where I am,
and recognizing its resemblance to itself
in the midst of a fierce, mid-winter freeze.
I suppose I’m still making stabs
at attaining that transcendent experience,
ever since my first holy communion,
a wafer-taste emerging on my tongue
as I write, mixed now with a straight-forward
mocha flavor, no cream no sugar, unadulterated
adulteration, pure as can be. But that’s
how we always start everything it seems,
waiting and waiting until we can’t
see another way out, a few confessions
and blandishments along the way and then
it’s all over. The baby wakes up, the phone
rings, and what with the diaper and all.
And before you know it the buzzing
of reality has stopped and your eyelids
are closing ever so slowly. A black spider
crawls up one side of the door and then
the other before it reaches the top,
where it continues steadily along its path,
rightside up for now, and you breathe
a long pleasant sigh of relief in your sleep.

 

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Summer Questions

 

Can I imagine a life without them?
It is the anger I would miss.
How wind can come upon you as you
picture yourself in the fall,
standing in the middle of an apple orchard
with your hand outstretched for the
last time of the day, and suddenly
the entire summer’s complexion has changed.
They are the incompletions, lying awake
at night and picturing the purity
of an imaginary planet’s skies. They are
the lies that make up the thin tissue
we think of as skin and July’s grass
and purple loosestrife. They are evenings
in early August, the sun’s last light
stretching itself pink and reluctant
over the orchard’s high straggling limbs.
Trying to make it appear so natural.

 

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There Was a Time

 

1.
There was a time when what I wanted to say
came to me unhesitantly, the ease
not so much in how it was to be phrased
or what words to use, but in the faith
I had in the foundation of sayings.
Like in a dry spell as a boy when I could
stand at the bottom of what was a small pond
and look down at all the cracks that marked
where patches of earth the size of large
sea turtles had separated but could be
reunited in a nice common rain. The slightest
smell of it in the air and I could imagine
again the catfish scanning the silt,
my hook down there being dragged around,
drawing attention to itself as a squirming,
nourishing morsel. But even the patches
of earth themselves were refreshing
in their own way, the way you could leap
from one shell to the next, large as continents,
and then pause and look up just in time
to see a player piano-shaped cloud drop its
tune trippingly from the sky, the beginning
of a long, large-dropped, shirt-soaking shower.
And you could imagine the continents
growing soggy and you worrying about it
raining for forty days and forty nights
and how you were going to fit them all
two by two in what it was you had no way
of knowing how to build, let alone
find the words to tell the others.

 

2.
Now, it’s as if the dandelion seeds
flying in the air, sometimes it seems as fast
as birds, could be the words themselves.
As if being here watching the swallows
weave between powerlines is a way of weaving
between the lines myself. And to take
ourselves back to the time before we sat
down to muse about going back, or to muse
by going back, would be a way of disingenuously
seeing ourselves here, of being here,
as if just being here isn’t enough.
What I want to say now is in the margins,
that place where the dandelion seeds in the air
come from and disappear to, and where
the goldfinch hides when it’s not within
the view of my window. And it wouldn’t
help to get a larger window, for discovery
is what’s outside the aperture, which dislocates
and misplaces. And discovery is, after all,
the only setting worth sitting at, the placemat
of the greatest meal–even if we do suspect
when we sit down that there may be an old
forgotten hook somewhere in one of the dishes,
the baked sole perhaps, the lightly battered haddock,
or the deep-fried catfish with its myriad
meandering bones you have to always be on the lookout
for with that curious dexterity of tongue
and roof of the mouth, so you can never
just relax and taste the taste. Little bones
like hooks themselves waiting for you
to swallow hook line and sinker if you are
so inclined. That is, gullible enough to want
it all: the dips and subtle hesitations
of swallows skimming the treetops, as well as
the slow movements in the darkness of ponds.

 

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Stars of Desire

 

I would like to have written
about the falling stars for you.
How one after another streamed
like tears down the face
of the night sky,
the sky shrouded here and there
by thin clouds appearing from the West.
And how those clouds would turn
the night’s face inscrutable
for a few passing moments,
as if it were longing,
or lost in thought.
But we didn’t see them as we
would have liked: clear as
notes in a piano sonata
tripping down the scale in trill
or tremolo, or in multitudinous
burstings like slow, silent fireworks.
I had known it all along,
before we sat down outside
in chairs with our heads back
in a sort of obverse position
of homage and prayer. Had known it
as we hummed old songs
for our daughter in your lap,
each of us imagining
how it might be to be back
in our mother’s arms–
listening to a voice as familiar
as our own pulling us down
into deep sleep like stars falling
into earth. That night
you came to me in the smooth
skin of a half-dream
and convinced me in whispers
that we had seen the stars
as we had wished. That those flames
were the source of these
momentary passions, were ours.