Poetry by Brian Johnson
Memoirs, Book One
Childhood moves in and never leaves.
We kept the pool covered up.
Poetry is old love—reformed, improved.
Point your slippers toward the bed.
Words have a tendency to wane.
Dying: everything now and everything then.
Music was something else, not dying.
Who will find my silkworm droppings?
Oil on linen, all of me.
The drifter on the last train.
There were yarns. There was ligamentation.
A bear pawing at someone’s tent.
Beside the point was another point.
Hares run only to other hares.
Hatred has no listening hours.
The sediment of ash is snow.
At night, old alphabets sweeten up.
Songs die, but the melody carries.
The leopard’s cells manufacture its roses.
With math you cannot go wrong.
One criticizes architects; another, child prodigies.
The wet oars amounted to nothing.
When the many clouds turned blue.
The stones I petted, rolled back.
A bare table has a tablecloth.
Green can be lacewing and cabbage.
So much vegetation comes to grief.
Stored my heart in a barn.
Sparrows are the offspring of prayers.
I was the maker of marmalades.
Light is virginal regardless of year.
Memoirs, Book Two
I married, had children, read books.
I was not misbegotten and rotten.
I shelved the past. And reopened.
Every problem was solved with touch.
The vases could all be filled.
Frogs were a species worth loving.
I glided on the longest yard.
What was momentary was never painful.
The living saw none of it.
The sediment of ash is snow.
I learned to sleep under trees.
Ink gurgles and gurgles, like milk.
The Midwest is one big epigraph.
A land together with its tracks.
The wheels can be rolled back.
O Jesus is a bee sting.
O Jesus is the hey hey.
O Jesus is swimming, swimming away.
It was so hard to bear.
I was flesh of some troubled flesh.
I was lost in a cafeteria.
The nesting place was crashed, then;
Our leagues of grass were poisoned.
All passages run out of air.
You turned my felt to scraps.
You turned my fruit to travesty.
You turned my ballgames to mass.
A branch extends darkness into light.
Love survives on its weakest fumes.
Chevy girl, I remember (easily) you.
Soaked tablecloth in Williamsburg, you also.
Names live scribbled, wrinkled, with fading.
My skin was always a sheepskin.
O Jesus is filling the stations.
Brian Johnson is the author of Self-Portrait, a chapbook; Torch Lake and Other Poems, a finalist for the Norma Farber First Book Award; and Site Visits, a collaborative work with the German painter Burghard Müller-Dannhausen. His work has appeared in several anthologies and many literary journals, including Massachusetts Review, Bennington Review, West Branch, American Letters and Commentary, North Dakota Quarterly, Court Green, Apple Valley Review, Interim, and The Prose Poem: An International Journal. The recipient of two Connecticut Commission on the Arts Fellowships, he teaches poetry, composition, and classical rhetoric at Southern Connecticut State University.
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