Three Poems by Braden Bell
Braden Bell
THREE POEMS
1. JULY
There is time today
To draw the last black ounce of news
From the paper.
They've got names in those pages
That just won't quit, won't last, either.
Keep talking, keep talking.
There is a price, I remember, for having
Been there, for having known what they'd said
And saying it back to the paper in whispers,
Like they'd have mattered.
There is time today to pay hard money
To know that fires breed and bare feet clamber, to
Talk to the turning page about the How, and
The What After . . . Keep talking . . .
Bright nights and loud mortars deafen and alight
That place in the brain that cries yes and cautions no,
Marking the shrinking feeling that, to go . . .
One must start walking
But won't, just can't, not
When you're talking. Be quiet.
There is death to dodge, there are
Places to go
Alone
To kill the whys and the hows.
They're called bars.
They sell the papers, but I won't read them.
I'm not from here. I don't know you. I can't
Hear you, but please
Keep talking.
2. FOR SOMEONE SOMEWHERE
Took a number at the station
And the floors weren’t dirty
They weren’t but they were full
Don’t panic is all I can say
This is what floors in city stations
Are for:
Waiting then paying and going
As the fast-track monolith gets moving
And reading in a red seat beside a Frenchwoman
Nothing in her Der Spiegel splayed saying
Stay or don’t …
The ferry rises up
De-train and taste hot coffee on deck
Taste the channel up there
And if I saw the wind I felt it’d be a wet blanket
Smelling like age
But mostly like today
This
Is how to get a start
At the very end of things
This
Is how to warm the sardonic arm
As it shakes another sardonic bird away
Inviting mad motion back to the shoes …
Here comes landfall
In the space between the landfill and the mouthful
Of words I’d tell her
If I knew her.
3. WHAT MAKES MOST SENSE...
Is the Ghost Crab
Of the Namibian Skeleton Coast as it finds
Today's newest sand-spit and burrows ten inches below
The beaten surface, blindly
Eating tiny living things
Just in time for the wind to blow its cover from the haze
And take the crab away.
But the little bastard is built like a mid-century Ford
And it has fun, true fun, as it lands lost at the edge
Of the inland desert and crawls back across it,
Too strange to suck death from the slow trail to shore
And when it gets there nothing looks the same, the weather's
Changed, so it digs its place in the intertidal zone, bracing
Its slight, pale person for another blast.
A gull touches down, mistaking a plastic jug in the sandbar
For a white shell but it's hungry so it keeps the litter
In its craw while the wind picks up,
throwing it high and it won't let go,
goes higher . . .
It can see the dread desert from up here, so it drops the jug
And flies the fuck away,
Ghost Crab smiling as it crawls, having laughed as it flew.