Sample Poems by Gaylord Brewer
My Secret Life of Crime
The trappings are the character—no piercings,
no tattoos, nothing to suggest one’s a punk
with a grudge or a man on a mission.
Instead, good honest haircut, clean clothes
in unremarkable tones of beige and autumn requiem,
3-year-old midsize driven consistently
just above the speed limit, just so,
with just the required reflexes while slowing
for fatalities. To be inconspicuous,
invisible, citizen between the lines. No guns,
no violence ever, only excesses
marked for special occasion. No theatre masks
of yin and yang, their frames stuffed with loot.
No suitcase buried out back. No paper.
Just a nice abiding life of law and industry,
a record to prove it. No stupid slips, no
cops. Just wife, house, dog, the benign patience.
And a morning somewhere, during the routine
ache of the job or buying milk and newspaper,
sometime, a moment that presents itself,
whether as smash and grab or golden divinity
at your feet. Until then: vigilant but relaxed,
the smiling host. Always: checking impulse—
that sweet-tooth for trouble’s black molasses—
against recognition of God’s clarifying offer
for any son ordained in the brazen and sublime.
And doing it. Once only, like the machine
a man has trained to be. Everything the same
afterwards. Nothing the same. You ask, is this
manifesto, assembly guide, a good-bye nod
to the pier? No. More playful irony. Hey,
the future’s secure—you know me, you’ve known
me forever. Keep telling yourself that.
Between Seasons
I step high across frosted terrain
in my shorts and slippers
and denim jacket,
carry an armful of split wood
and kindling back to a clay chimney
outside the house.
There, I build the first fire
of my favorite season, sit with coffee
and cream and a good book
until the fleshy insides of legs
are pink and hot to touch.
As sun clears the roof
in widening portion, I take its message
on my head, then shoulders,
and I am pulled
from autumn backwards
into summer. If you are waiting,
however, for the other slipper
to drop, for news of the newly dead
or a stuttering love at last
exposed and slain . . .
well, don’t. It’s my kind of morning,
the edge of my season,
at the door of my month.
Nothing calamitous hovers over
today’s favorable forecast,
and I am even expecting a letter
of glad and propitious tidings.
Don’t worry. The weekend always
arrives, loaded with error and regret.
And even as I slurp the last
of my beverage and watch logs collapse
in fiery exhaustion, I know
perfectly well it’s also the season
of death, the one anticipating
a burial in snow,
and perhaps that’s my pleasure, too.
Ode to the Fig
Gutters bulge with leaves
and a swirl of bills demands payment,
but I just can’t say no
to this small persimmon bowl
of late figs, so tempting, so cold.
I adore their droopy roundness,
their cobalt skin shiny with sweat.
A harem of five when I began
only moments ago, now three remain.
I love autumn, the cool, clear
days it’s begun to send, but what
compares to these dark globes
of sensuality, teasing resistance
against teeth, then the yielding
soft flesh, wet red center,
crunch of tiny seeds.
Luscious fig, glorious
sultry fig, so inviting, emblem
of forgotten garden, innocence sold,
high cost of a taste
of sweet earthly knowledge.
There’s a bible of recipes praising
your moods and dispositions,
a French religion. But best,
morning of the season’s last day,
is simply to raise a final
ripe pendulum on fingertips, take it
gently, like so, as the body inhales,
eyelids flutter, and the altar
of the lips parts to its syrupy kiss.
Big Ed’s Dead
Who guided us through the cold splendor
and the mercies of art and word, who commanded us
to live harder, love deeper, remember
years were winter chestnuts, dark but sweetly yielding.
Ed, who introduced us to the famous novelist
and his plain, disdainful wife;
who taught us to ski the slopes
of Central Park amid a flux of mad, happy humanity
on the last day of the last complete century;
who made us a gift of our lost magic. Ed who ordered
spice in both Mandarin and Szechuan
as green tea steamed between our grateful hands;
who confided a lifetime ago he’d learned seven languages
for a decade as spy and code-breaker.
Whom we never believed then, but nearly did later,
when he paraded us on Broadway
below the lights of Lincoln Center
across the apex of the world,
trampling all the way our sad and sludged ironies
on that final forgiven night of the universe,
when Ed weighted the trunk of his borrowed Eldorado
with platters of shrimp, obscenely long,
three cases of champagne—one for us each—and stood
ankle-deep in dirty snow
as traffic snaked and snarled,
and laughed, raising my wife to our fugitive sky,
and kissed me; who believed all good things delivered
here and now for his celebration
and that the next round of millennium
would be on all of us, forever. Big Ed’s dead,
who never asked to be spared, and wasn’t.
Big Ed is dead, as dead as can be, and we
shall see him no more, not in this life or another.