John Brooks
Cygnet
So many fireflies. Tonight’s their night.
There are sixteen types of furniture
that are going extinct, including
the beds where I fucked you
and the bed where you fucked me.
You, of nature and better than nature.
You, of beauty and better than beauty.
I am not friends with any other swans.
My childhood was lonely; I sung
myself to sleep. Hymns mostly, How
Great Thou Art: then sings my soul!
I thought that was the most beautiful
line, and the way the music crescendoed.
Since you left I haven’t wanted any
sounds. When this necklace of shared nights
became unclasped and all the pearls
slipped through our hands and rolled
into the deadly world, I didn’t see it
coming. All the while, I was the enemy
sat at the dinner table, doling out delicata,
passing the sumac. Snakes’ tongues flicked
in the winter woods, making a majestic
anthem. Later, your eyes followed
the fuzzy routes of silver moths,
and I bought silver shoes so you
would not see me coming. I miss
our sublime fucking. You are now
something lost to me. Year zero, July.
You have given me the dark. Dark
is a way of knowing how to live.
When Claudia said she was trying
to photograph the lightning, I thought
of you. When the knife sliced into ripe
nectarine flesh and the juice pooled
in the plate, I thought of you. People do
crazy things. One headline this morning
read “Why Not to Cut the Tips Off
Strawberries.” Because of gravity,
that’s where all the sugar is.
Lakehouse IV
Any photograph depicts a now
we’ve lost. Even the faintest light
is precious. A loose petal, the sun drops
and disappears so that we know nothing
belongs to us, not even our own skeletons,
which, if you think about it, possess
their own keen sense of time. Walking away
from the lake, you are so young. Behind
you, a green fog—sugary, shapeless—
floats the length of you above the smooth,
wet surface. In the foreground, a dragonfly
pilots between the camera’s lens
and the middle distance your slim
body inhabits. A dragonfly-shaped
shadow darkens the glittering
grass, but strangely, you don’t
make one. Though described as rather
plain, here, in the periphery, a lone
nightingale perches, a king surveying
his empire. Ornis means bird
and omen. I want to translate the crow
language that drifts in pale clouds.
When I go to text you, heart gripped
by impulse, autocorrect corrects
oblivious to o libido.
John Brooks reads “Cygnet” and “Lakehouse IV”
John Brooks‘ poetry has been published in Appalachian Review, Good River Review, East by Northeast, Plainsongs, and Assaracus; he has written for BOMB, Ruckus Journal, UnderMain, and Strange Fire Collective. Brooks’ visual work has been published in The New Yorker, Texte zur Kunst, The Yale Review, Golf Digest, Action Spectacle, The New York Review of Books, and is held in numerous collections including Speed Art Museum, The Green Family Art Foundation, Grinnell College Museum of Art, OZ Arts, and 21C. After living in Louisville, Kentucky for the last decade, he is now based in Los Angeles.