Bronwyn Mills
The Season of Splitting Apart
(...in the Chinese book of wisdom, the I Ching,
what follows the hexagram K’un when the top line
moves. Of that line it is said: “Dragons fight in the
meadow/ their blood is black and yellow.”)
April’s full yang moon began with an eclipse--
Then there were three days of hollow nights,
the nights when we woke to the flat moon
staring us in the face, scattering the shadows
around our bed with its gaze. In the next light,
the sun slipped past its meridian, bringing
the first warm days to New England.
I got up at four-thirty in the morning,
drove the truck down our lane
with the full moon at home’s end. Evergreens
broke the pink edge of the horizon in front.
I entered the clearing:
Imagine a single note plucked from a
Chinese lute. Imagine that last summer’s cattle
reappeared. They stood in that sound, silent,
each stretching their great bracts toward the moon
like the blanched wingspan of a pterodactyl. Through
the channel of evergreen and birch, the purple hills
heaved their saurian backs against the rising sun.
The sun. The moon. The rising sun, the setting moon--
each in its fullness, they teetered on the rim of the earth
as if it were no more than a pie plate. Dragons like
alley cats, facing off and marking their turf.
This is called “Splitting Apart”: when
the battle ensues.
Blackout with Pigs
(Jersey City, August 14, 2003)
In Ed’s kitchen, no A.C.,
hot, humid, Gene filling plastic
balls with peanuts for the pigs’
“exercise.” Barefoot, I sip
Turkish rakı after Ed’s
special dish—“the Imam fainted,”
(it was that good.) Afterwards
pig flop, Porcus porcae, Pig
of Pigs! Egypt’s Great Pig Set--
Oh, to scratch the silk behind
the palm of those ears again;
candlelight, Tibo’s soft neck on
one bare foot; Lonnie’s, on
the other.
Condylura cristata
(The Star-Snouted Mole)
Knobbed tail, that’s what it means,
but that’s a mistake. The detail’s
in the nose—imagine! life
with that stuck on your face,
each birthstar sealed in parchment
like a caul. Its cold fire blooms,
you are flower faced; your feet
row through the earth, rotifer
nosed, trembling and tentacled;
moleskin suit, waterproof--
twinkle twinkle little snoot,
something’s alive below you.
You plow through deep snows, feel
beneath frosted ground—worm’s fright;
mole’s delight.
Cleopatra’s Suicide
Imagine putting an asp
to your breast, your nipple passed
on to a poisonous snake,
a reptile who takes a fast
bite, unable to resist
the warmth of your blood as it slips
through your vessels like ice floes
broken, crowding the sluices to tip-
toe through early spring, creaking
like ships, like Anthony leaving
—the hypocrite! how he warmed
to heated blood, armed weeping.
Blood
Red efts cross my dirt lane
they’re young newts in progress
they’re crimson lizards, feigned
landmovers, they are less
amphibious than flame;
their spots signal distress
eight sparks spell their names
on livid bloodless backs;
you toss them in the flames
legend says (this torture lacks
conviction) they are unscathed,
neither consumed nor back
to the same red. Old and unbathed
their time in water lasts
long enough to be betrayed
by the fact of birth. Nothing lasts,
you know that. From its egg
to its eft, to its past.
Autumn
You want to lift the curtain
of clouds from the sky
or plunge deep in a leaf
before it disintegrates. You want
to crack the jacket of frost
around the meadowgrass
and catch the sap descending
before the sense of loss
weighs down your dreams,
bending them as thunder
bends the trees.
Menu
An old woman in a rowboat crouches at the end of a line and rod.
She lives in a cabin by the village reservoir. Half a greenhouse
snuggles up to one side of the cabin; on the other, a plaster
Virgin waves at passersby. Last week, the old woman’s grown kids
packed their pick-ups and drove home, carried off the “Do Sports,
Not Drugs” bumper stickers, the cases of Miller’s, and the
grandson hiding, skinny and shivering in the truckbed, the
older sister counting, “One hundred and one, one hundred and
two...”
She fixes the bait on her hook. The moon is rising from the water’s rim
Somewhere in the middle another moon is floating like a
hatchet fish, sleepwalking toward another hook.
Gravity
And he was afraid and said, How dreadful
is this place! this is none other but the house
of God, and this is the gate of heaven.
—GENESIS 29:17
In a dream, Jacob set his ladder
against the marquee: angels scatter
overhead, they leap up like salmon,
sides gleaming; their descent was sadder
than the sun going down, fluorescent for
the miracle matinee, blessing
the salmon and the fishermen’s net
meant to catch them. Jacob will beget
holy families with mortal seed,
stringing his sperm like fish eggs, fat beads
on stone pillows for angels who leap
at God’s promises. What do they see
when the price of promises, like beads,
is a sleek fish filled with reasons?
Jacob’s adversaries rise and fall
against holy gravity, a squall
of flurried light that will not leave him
alone one minute, waking or sleeping:
as common as dust, the Divine face
stares back at him from every place
Bronwyn Mills received her MFA under poet, James Tate (UMass, Amherst); her Ph.D.(Comparative Literature) under poet Kamau Brathwaite, and novelist Ngugi wa Thiong'o at NYU, and was an Anais Nin Fellow. Besides New York, she has also lived in Istanbul, Turkey, La République du Bénin (where, as a Fulbright Fellow, she played hooky with vodou priests); Paris, France; and Western Massachusetts. She reviewed dance and theatre for the Valley Advocate and The Greenfield Recorder, was senior editor for the online literary journal, Frigate, and is a senior prose editors for the online journal, Tupelo Quarterly (http://www.tupeloquarterly.com/). She also recently guest edited the Turkish issue of Absinthe: New Europe Writing (#19.). Bronwyn has taught at Stevens Institute of Technology; Kadir Has University in Istanbul; and Abomey-Calavi in Bénin. Books include Night of the Luna Moths (March Street Press) and fabulist novel, Beastley's Tale (Rocky Shores). She is working on two new novels, Letters from H. and Canary Club, contributing to TQ's editorial page (“The River Road,” “Animal Kingdom,” and, soon, “Fly Me to the Moon and Let Me Play among the Stars.”) From time to time she contributes articles to scholarly journals on the subject of vodou. Now living and writing in a tiny mountain village far, far away, Bronwyn is interested in the palimpsest of language and how it reveals our deepest collective secrets.
.
The Season of Splitting Apart
(...in the Chinese book of wisdom, the I Ching,
what follows the hexagram K’un when the top line
moves. Of that line it is said: “Dragons fight in the
meadow/ their blood is black and yellow.”)
April’s full yang moon began with an eclipse--
Then there were three days of hollow nights,
the nights when we woke to the flat moon
staring us in the face, scattering the shadows
around our bed with its gaze. In the next light,
the sun slipped past its meridian, bringing
the first warm days to New England.
I got up at four-thirty in the morning,
drove the truck down our lane
with the full moon at home’s end. Evergreens
broke the pink edge of the horizon in front.
I entered the clearing:
Imagine a single note plucked from a
Chinese lute. Imagine that last summer’s cattle
reappeared. They stood in that sound, silent,
each stretching their great bracts toward the moon
like the blanched wingspan of a pterodactyl. Through
the channel of evergreen and birch, the purple hills
heaved their saurian backs against the rising sun.
The sun. The moon. The rising sun, the setting moon--
each in its fullness, they teetered on the rim of the earth
as if it were no more than a pie plate. Dragons like
alley cats, facing off and marking their turf.
This is called “Splitting Apart”: when
the battle ensues.
Blackout with Pigs
(Jersey City, August 14, 2003)
In Ed’s kitchen, no A.C.,
hot, humid, Gene filling plastic
balls with peanuts for the pigs’
“exercise.” Barefoot, I sip
Turkish rakı after Ed’s
special dish—“the Imam fainted,”
(it was that good.) Afterwards
pig flop, Porcus porcae, Pig
of Pigs! Egypt’s Great Pig Set--
Oh, to scratch the silk behind
the palm of those ears again;
candlelight, Tibo’s soft neck on
one bare foot; Lonnie’s, on
the other.
Condylura cristata
(The Star-Snouted Mole)
Knobbed tail, that’s what it means,
but that’s a mistake. The detail’s
in the nose—imagine! life
with that stuck on your face,
each birthstar sealed in parchment
like a caul. Its cold fire blooms,
you are flower faced; your feet
row through the earth, rotifer
nosed, trembling and tentacled;
moleskin suit, waterproof--
twinkle twinkle little snoot,
something’s alive below you.
You plow through deep snows, feel
beneath frosted ground—worm’s fright;
mole’s delight.
Cleopatra’s Suicide
Imagine putting an asp
to your breast, your nipple passed
on to a poisonous snake,
a reptile who takes a fast
bite, unable to resist
the warmth of your blood as it slips
through your vessels like ice floes
broken, crowding the sluices to tip-
toe through early spring, creaking
like ships, like Anthony leaving
—the hypocrite! how he warmed
to heated blood, armed weeping.
Blood
Red efts cross my dirt lane
they’re young newts in progress
they’re crimson lizards, feigned
landmovers, they are less
amphibious than flame;
their spots signal distress
eight sparks spell their names
on livid bloodless backs;
you toss them in the flames
legend says (this torture lacks
conviction) they are unscathed,
neither consumed nor back
to the same red. Old and unbathed
their time in water lasts
long enough to be betrayed
by the fact of birth. Nothing lasts,
you know that. From its egg
to its eft, to its past.
Autumn
You want to lift the curtain
of clouds from the sky
or plunge deep in a leaf
before it disintegrates. You want
to crack the jacket of frost
around the meadowgrass
and catch the sap descending
before the sense of loss
weighs down your dreams,
bending them as thunder
bends the trees.
Menu
An old woman in a rowboat crouches at the end of a line and rod.
She lives in a cabin by the village reservoir. Half a greenhouse
snuggles up to one side of the cabin; on the other, a plaster
Virgin waves at passersby. Last week, the old woman’s grown kids
packed their pick-ups and drove home, carried off the “Do Sports,
Not Drugs” bumper stickers, the cases of Miller’s, and the
grandson hiding, skinny and shivering in the truckbed, the
older sister counting, “One hundred and one, one hundred and
two...”
She fixes the bait on her hook. The moon is rising from the water’s rim
Somewhere in the middle another moon is floating like a
hatchet fish, sleepwalking toward another hook.
Gravity
And he was afraid and said, How dreadful
is this place! this is none other but the house
of God, and this is the gate of heaven.
—GENESIS 29:17
In a dream, Jacob set his ladder
against the marquee: angels scatter
overhead, they leap up like salmon,
sides gleaming; their descent was sadder
than the sun going down, fluorescent for
the miracle matinee, blessing
the salmon and the fishermen’s net
meant to catch them. Jacob will beget
holy families with mortal seed,
stringing his sperm like fish eggs, fat beads
on stone pillows for angels who leap
at God’s promises. What do they see
when the price of promises, like beads,
is a sleek fish filled with reasons?
Jacob’s adversaries rise and fall
against holy gravity, a squall
of flurried light that will not leave him
alone one minute, waking or sleeping:
as common as dust, the Divine face
stares back at him from every place
Bronwyn Mills received her MFA under poet, James Tate (UMass, Amherst); her Ph.D.(Comparative Literature) under poet Kamau Brathwaite, and novelist Ngugi wa Thiong'o at NYU, and was an Anais Nin Fellow. Besides New York, she has also lived in Istanbul, Turkey, La République du Bénin (where, as a Fulbright Fellow, she played hooky with vodou priests); Paris, France; and Western Massachusetts. She reviewed dance and theatre for the Valley Advocate and The Greenfield Recorder, was senior editor for the online literary journal, Frigate, and is a senior prose editors for the online journal, Tupelo Quarterly (http://www.tupeloquarterly.com/). She also recently guest edited the Turkish issue of Absinthe: New Europe Writing (#19.). Bronwyn has taught at Stevens Institute of Technology; Kadir Has University in Istanbul; and Abomey-Calavi in Bénin. Books include Night of the Luna Moths (March Street Press) and fabulist novel, Beastley's Tale (Rocky Shores). She is working on two new novels, Letters from H. and Canary Club, contributing to TQ's editorial page (“The River Road,” “Animal Kingdom,” and, soon, “Fly Me to the Moon and Let Me Play among the Stars.”) From time to time she contributes articles to scholarly journals on the subject of vodou. Now living and writing in a tiny mountain village far, far away, Bronwyn is interested in the palimpsest of language and how it reveals our deepest collective secrets.
.