Open and Closed, I
after April Gornik
Nothing is clear
but the blank
nothing that separates
bushland from raincloud.
That isn’t right. Notice
the break of black
shrubs, the light
grey and dots of white
that could be sand.
A path, at least:
to sea? to hill
overlooking more grass?
I imagine shadow
across the grand vision
beyond the canvas.
Or is that missing
suture included too
in the charcoal marks?
Assumed horizon,
estuary, the lasting
oasis past the pastel
perimeter that has
not but will soon
be covered
in rain.
The open space
will be livid shadow
over water, over city,
over hill or self or stream.
You must have seen so,
already reached in
your own basket of possible
visits. Not to be peered through,
or beyond, but found
here in smudges of thumbs
that could but don’t involve
amaranth, teak, bullion
of sands—like a dream
remembered dark, as children
sit and wiggle and watch
the shore or the rolling hills
of Texas, half-expecting to walk
toward the promise of sun
which here is not included,
except in the blank
brightening above the dense,
pregnant belly of the seeming
endless cloud.
Wild and Whirling
What’s worrying you? There’s that
wayward sky to look at. The forecast
today arrives in layers: bluegrey bulbous clouds
below a flat, diffuse sheet of white.
Admittedly, I have a particularly wide,
romantic view of the problem
on these flat plains and this
walk-bridge over 84. But I’d guess
it’s calmer there, at least. You can listen
to the cleat frequencies of keys,
doves in the cottonwood,
the peaceful metronome of our clocks.
Such human inventions, dicing up the day
into its dutiful segments. Again,
there are options: I can dread
the sudden, inevitable dénouement
hidden in the preach of each tick,
or rejoice knowing you’ll be waiting
at the table as the hand slams into 5
with a napkin in your lap and a chalice
in your happy hand
when like a rainstorm
I’ll appear—oh, at the specified time!
the specified place! Or, knowing
we’ll walk at noon along
the black-eyed Susans and dense petaled dahlias
in the horticulture gardens,
Tomorrow appears as if smell
were all I touched this world with. How often
our experience of the now is a prediction
of the next. And after that? A whole mess
of sense data dissolves like cotton on the ocean.
Or, that first cattail I ever picked
beside the lake and named it your name.
The seeds like solid timber bunched at the end
of a reed, compacted and pregnant
like air between eyes before a kiss.
The way it bloomed a million directions,
sudden explosion at the slightest touch—
and what I called your name
took off on the blind wind
wild and whirling as words
to disappear into the water
and among the huge oaks
strung with lights by the water’s edge.
Heading West
The consequences come as follows:
like a bird brain’s magnets, like a steeple.
One could mention the mesquites, greasewood
that inhabit the mind like a quiet suitor
in the foyer. Or elsewhere, the mosquitoes,
estuaries, and oaks. Two initial reactions:
place-pride or shame as the brain
sops the standing daylight
as bread sops soup. The self
gets lost in landscape whose widening
overcasts the flattened and shrinking,
fighting, stinking ego. Or
something of both can occur,
as when the seated figure blends peacefully
between the given pigment whose color
and character depends on the climate
(see Monet’s Weeping Willows).
Habits of Nature and the Customs of Men
That system’s sticking around, man.
Without the sun for two weeks
the plains are cold and dry and unbearable.
New down, cut wood, lotion;
turns out, I’d been planning all along
for the habits of Nature to feel unnatural.
In the summer, shedding of clothes.
To do otherwise would be mad
Jared’s father said. And then
he beat his kid. Out, out, brief violence
of the heart. Just this morning you sent a link
to “Outblowing” and I read it on my phone
and wanted to toss in nature to feel again natural.
Tell me, Fool, good Athenian,
from where does the thunder come?
Is to be to bear this stiff wind?
If I make a music, I can’t sustain it.
Men must not cut down trees. There is a God.
Even he called loneliness a failure
which is why, instead of copies, he made us,
the thunder to strike us down,
the garden to keep us
yearning to return,
and then fire, that system
of weather that hangs around
until we say it breaks. Power is not merely gain
or loss; I love you; I see no other way.
Caleb Braun earned an MFA in poetry from the University of Washington, where he received the Harold Taylor Prize. He is a Ph.D. candidate in creative writing at Texas Tech University. His poems have appeared in Best New Poets 2022, The Gettysburg Review, Blackbird, 32 Poems, and elsewhere. He can be found online at calebbraun.com.
Header photo by Brigipix, courtesy Pixabay.
