A Writer in Athens

bob brussack

Room 214

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The night nurse makes her rounds
With the gentle tread of a librarian
Among closed stacks of forgotten volumes
So fragile they might crumble at a touch.

Mrs. Lovell — Angie she was —
In Room 214, glides again in sleep
Across the ice of Oldham’s Pond,
Her alabaster skates agleam
In the February sun of her eighth year.
Her bed will be available in the morning.

(The character portrayed in this work is fictional.)

Dogs Are Not Silly Putty

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Dogs are not Silly Putty.
You can’t mash a dog into a plastic pancake with the palm of your hand
And press it to the Sunday comics
And make a copy of The Phantom on a jungle path.
You can’t squeeze a dog into a tight, smooth orb of kinetic mischief
And bounce it insanely off the kitchen cabinets
Risking breakage.
You can’t put a dog in your pocket —
Well, not most dogs and most pockets —
And take it to school,
Secret from the teachers,
A treasure to see you through
An hour of multiplication tables.
Still, I’d rather have a dog than Silly Putty.

Moments

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Moments, by themselves,
Are the merest things,
Never quite here,
Then gone —
Elusive as
Fermilab’s prey.

But they collect downstream,
Where memory waits —
Beads for her art.

And we wear them then,
And feel their weight,
And their warmth,
And their sting.

Milner

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What good I do,
I do willy-nilly
And here and there,
Charity in the second degree,
Unpremeditated —
Except at tax time.
But there are among us —
I know one —
Devil hunters,
Sworn assassins of sorrows,
Career soldiers
In a war against the
Fallenness of the world.
Some of these — most, I expect —
Were drafted to the brigades
By the awful gravity of suffering.
Others — the one I know —
Came to the cause impelled
Not just by heart’s imperative,
But by considered judgment.
Reason, for him, required a
Vigilant, constant, inventive charity.
One needn’t believe in God
To believe in angels.

White Whispers

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It's on these antiseptically sharp winter nights,

When the air huddles, silent,
That I overhear the stars,

Their white whispers tinctured with bemusement.

They needn’t keep their voices low for me,

Like parents downstairs on Christmas Eve.
I take comfort in the void.
It’s the emptiness between the atoms

That sets me free.

Plastic Pearls and Purple Parasols

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Plastic pearls and purple parasols,
Asleep in their bins and boxes along aisle three
At the party store,
Summoned then to a Saturday night
By the twelve-bar soliloquy
Of a slide trombone,
Shimmer and sway
In dim incandescence
Above a dusty dance floor,
Totems to levitate us
By flat thirds to a most exquisite
Abandon.

Let's Be Honest

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Let's be honest.
Let's be leprechauns
Or unicorns
Or the man in the moon.
Let's crack the sternum
And transect the honesty sac
And send the contents
To pathology for revelation.
Let's hold our breath
And dive beyond knowing
Into the authentic dark
And throw a tow line
Around honesty
And winch it to the surface.
Let's be honest
About the only thing
We can be honest about.