A Writer in Athens http://awriterinathens.com bob brussack posterous.com Tue, 05 Apr 2011 13:40:00 -0700 Leave the Neon Behind http://awriterinathens.com/leave-the-neon-behind http://awriterinathens.com/leave-the-neon-behind
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Drive out beyond the county line.
Find a new-mown field
Under an autumn moon.
Feel the chill
As it seeps past
The seams of your coat.
Unpack your cello.
Cradle it to you.
Close your eyes.
Give the universe a stir.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/635574/avatar4.jpg http://posterous.com/users/5Bcl8dRfP8cx Bob Brussack Bob Bob Brussack - Sat, 19 Mar 2011 06:53:00 -0700 Room 214 http://awriterinathens.com/room-214 http://awriterinathens.com/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.)

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/635574/avatar4.jpg http://posterous.com/users/5Bcl8dRfP8cx Bob Brussack Bob Bob Brussack - Sat, 19 Mar 2011 06:40:00 -0700 Dogs Are Not Silly Putty http://awriterinathens.com/dogs-are-not-silly-putty http://awriterinathens.com/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.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/635574/avatar4.jpg http://posterous.com/users/5Bcl8dRfP8cx Bob Brussack Bob Bob Brussack - Fri, 18 Mar 2011 15:53:00 -0700 Moments http://awriterinathens.com/moments http://awriterinathens.com/moments
moments.mp3 Listen on Posterous
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.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/635574/avatar4.jpg http://posterous.com/users/5Bcl8dRfP8cx Bob Brussack Bob Bob Brussack - Fri, 18 Mar 2011 15:42:00 -0700 Milner http://awriterinathens.com/milner http://awriterinathens.com/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.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/635574/avatar4.jpg http://posterous.com/users/5Bcl8dRfP8cx Bob Brussack Bob Bob Brussack - Fri, 18 Mar 2011 15:14:00 -0700 It's the Pixies http://awriterinathens.com/its-the-pixies http://awriterinathens.com/its-the-pixies
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It’s the pixies that make F-350’s
And subwoofers and sirens
And most such things --
To mask the flutter of their wings.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/635574/avatar4.jpg http://posterous.com/users/5Bcl8dRfP8cx Bob Brussack Bob Bob Brussack - Wed, 02 Mar 2011 12:13:00 -0800 White Whispers http://awriterinathens.com/white-whispers http://awriterinathens.com/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.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/635574/avatar4.jpg http://posterous.com/users/5Bcl8dRfP8cx Bob Brussack Bob Bob Brussack - Sat, 26 Feb 2011 06:07:00 -0800 Plastic Pearls and Purple Parasols http://awriterinathens.com/plastic-pearls-and-purple-parasols http://awriterinathens.com/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.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/635574/avatar4.jpg http://posterous.com/users/5Bcl8dRfP8cx Bob Brussack Bob Bob Brussack - Sun, 20 Feb 2011 07:09:00 -0800 Let's Be Honest http://awriterinathens.com/lets-be-honest http://awriterinathens.com/lets-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.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/635574/avatar4.jpg http://posterous.com/users/5Bcl8dRfP8cx Bob Brussack Bob Bob Brussack - Sat, 19 Feb 2011 05:13:00 -0800 Pearl Roundabout http://awriterinathens.com/pearl-roundabout http://awriterinathens.com/pearl-roundabout

pearlroundabout.mp3 Listen on Posterous

No need for tear gas.
We're already crying.
Why are we crying?
You can tell us.
Do our tears
Mark the measures
Of the abiding
Lament?
Do our tears
Soften the earth
For tomorrow's
Graves?
Do our tears
Anoint a
New Age,
Finally
Come?

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/635574/avatar4.jpg http://posterous.com/users/5Bcl8dRfP8cx Bob Brussack Bob Bob Brussack - Fri, 18 Feb 2011 15:20:00 -0800 Found Jesus http://awriterinathens.com/found-jesus http://awriterinathens.com/found-jesus

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All that she was,
and it was plenty,
was reduced by a scrub-faced preacher
at 1:13 p.m. on the afternoon they buried her
to this: in the final days before she left us, she found Jesus.
And maybe she did.
In a way.
“Nobody’s an atheist in a foxhole.”
So maybe she did.
Maybe she untethered herself
from all the evidence
and covered herself in a Jesus blanket.
I’ll probably do something similar,
push comes to shove comes to penultimate.
But what’s that the lawyers say
about consent under duress?
Anyhow, those of us who actually knew her
knew that, her physique notwithstanding,
she was pixie-souled.
Life’s a cabaret, old chum.
And she was in a hurry,
maybe because she’d known most of her life
that her life would be shorter than most.
Something about her kidneys.
Her wry wit poured from her
as if frantic to escape a condemned building in a tremor.
Her eyes sparkled behind her glasses.
A tilt of her lip gave her away
when she wanted her zingers
to sneak up on you unawares.
Okay, maybe she found Jesus.
But all that she was,
and it was plenty,
will not be cabined
within the claim
of an epiphanic moment.

This piece also appears in the Winter 2011 issue of Miller's Pond Poetry Magazine and on Athens Word of Mouth.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/635574/avatar4.jpg http://posterous.com/users/5Bcl8dRfP8cx Bob Brussack Bob Bob Brussack - Fri, 18 Feb 2011 05:58:00 -0800 The Letter "I" http://awriterinathens.com/the-letter-i http://awriterinathens.com/the-letter-i

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The letter “I” is appropriately thin,
A shadow cast by Euclid’s line.
The part of us we call “I”
Is a meager, nearly dimensionless thing,
As mute, almost, as a monk under vow —
A watcher at the window.
The rest of us, the magical part, lies beneath,
As inaccessible as Santa’s Workshop.

This piece appears in the Winter 2011 issue of Miller's Pond Poetry Magazine.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/635574/avatar4.jpg http://posterous.com/users/5Bcl8dRfP8cx Bob Brussack Bob Bob Brussack - Thu, 17 Feb 2011 16:21:00 -0800 Who We Are http://awriterinathens.com/who-we-are http://awriterinathens.com/who-we-are

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Do not call us Sunni.
Do not call us Shi’a.
Do not call us People of the Book.
We are People.
We declare our Independence
From the High Priests
And Potentates
Of the Always Has Been.
We Fill our Chests
With the Freedom
Of the New Century.
We Stand Ready to Build,
Not Burn, To Leave
The Shadows
And Lift Our Faces
To the Sun.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/635574/avatar4.jpg http://posterous.com/users/5Bcl8dRfP8cx Bob Brussack Bob Bob Brussack - Tue, 15 Feb 2011 05:50:00 -0800 It's Wednesday http://awriterinathens.com/its-wednesday http://awriterinathens.com/its-wednesday

itswednesday.mp3 Listen on Posterous

It’s Wednesday.
We whisper, almost, over our coffee,
Taking our mood from the January sky.
We have our spiral notebooks.
Bob Dylan says the answer is blowing in the wind.
The diffuse morning light transforms the burnt orange upholstery of the chair by the window.
She’s nearly a silhouette, isn’t she?

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/635574/avatar4.jpg http://posterous.com/users/5Bcl8dRfP8cx Bob Brussack Bob Bob Brussack - Wed, 09 Feb 2011 14:22:00 -0800 What I Saw on a February Afternoon http://awriterinathens.com/what-i-saw-on-a-february-afternoon http://awriterinathens.com/what-i-saw-on-a-february-afternoon

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Out there, beyond the clearing,
Under the bare limbs of the sleeping trees
In the chill gray light of a February afternoon,
Something caught my eye.
A tawny leaf on the forest floor,
Uncoaxed by any breeze,
Up and did a jig.
A few seconds later and a few feet away,
Another leaf erupted,
As if to the staccato cue of a plucked string.
And then another.
And another.
And then, as I resolved the details of the scene,
I realized that each leaf had a partner, a robin.
So, I thought to myself,
The snow that might come tonight
Will not long have its way.
The red-breasted vanguard of spring has arrived.

This piece also appears on Athens Word of Mouth.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/635574/avatar4.jpg http://posterous.com/users/5Bcl8dRfP8cx Bob Brussack Bob Bob Brussack -