five poems by Brian Brock

Would you rather be an ant or a mulberry tree?

Antsing ants, runts ranting over hot sand

Intent upon the footprint scent, chant frantic fancies and canst not stand intercept

Tree waves leaves in sunsingshiny wind

Earth hove, she bode, the berrybunches leapt

Clever death’s denier or a fool like me?

Meaning me, meandering, mean, mean, extreme, unmet

Meet me in the garden - you do no wrong to hold your place

Time suspended a tether yet

Settling back in the sunlight-sand embrace

How shall I rather? How shall we?

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under palo verde

nested tendernesses

little leafies verge yellow

tongue gusts soft tresses

she unbundling tumbling

tangent to wind waves

touching on leaflet

twig-clung wing let

he following the curve of her purl

twirling her knurl to the ground

and found

under palo verde

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At what level does the qualitative shift happen between the way we believe we know the weight of an atom and the way we believe we know the weight of a stone?

If there is no means by which to differentiate them, mustn't we suppose that neither is there any difference in the surety and intimacy of those encounters?

Shall we say that the lab equipment is part of us, then, or that the stone is ungrasped, merely measured?

(… and how then do we grasp the heaviness of a heart?)

So to come to say we are in the grasp of some knowing other, that we are agents of the selfhood of mother word, lab equipment which is a part of her.

We are a grasping of pond murk out from pond murk, selves midwiving selfhood.

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The self is the description of its own nonexistence.

When it points at itself it sees nothing there, yet it points now and then, you know.

Still, we can intimate at the culture, the life force increasing in us as we begin the curation of its growth, its pupation into tetherless metaphor.

In effecting this transformation we agence the selfhood of word. We experience that agency in physical form. This is the tether.

We asymptotically approach translation into pure metaphor, but to be untethered is to be mere potential, then to seek some form again like water.

This reformation is the divinity calling us - resubstantiating us into selfhood.

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The Honeybirds and the Hummingbees and the sand swirls all round

An entire day passes

What reason, within, judges me against my will?

Trap of wonder tightly drawn around the world

Skymachines bony-finger Cupid’s cuddle clouds

This unpopulated tract of unkempt scrub makes a maltreated hideout for many a loosed miscontent I'm sure

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