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The Argotist Online |
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ANDY BROWN
Andy Brown is Director of the Centre for Creative Writing at Exeter University. His recent books are Fall 0f the Rebel Angels: Poems 1996-2006 (Salt, 2006) and Goose Music, co-written with John Burnside (Salt, 2007). Previous books are Hunting the Kinnayas (Stride, 2004), From a Cliff (Arc, 2002) and of Science (Worple, 2001, with David Morley). He edited The Allotment: New Lyric Poets (Stride, 2006) and Binary Myths: Volumes 1&2 (2nd edition, Stride, 2004). Andy Brown was originally an Ecologist, a discipline that informs both his poetry and his criticism, which appears in The Salt Companion to the Works of Lee Harwood (Salt, 2007). A
STRETCH OF DIRT ROAD
Just
because our prints are faded doesn’t
mean the path’s not there. The
hidden trails our memories are familiar
with bump endlessly along: the
crunch of our feet; the rattle of
our wheels; our skittish horses galloping
away in thunderbursts. (Thunder?
but the sky is so blue!) To
those who live along the way, weather
lends weight to memory. ‘The
future will surely be different,’ they
say, ‘brighter; clearer?’ But time settles
too easily on us, like mist in
a valley, already dark on approach. Is
this the route we meant to travel, as
we reconnoitered the mainland; the
place we now call ‘Home’ assisting us to
remember the dead and welcome in the
living? We might have occasion to
follow them; to spend the night in
an abandoned church, a decrepit hacienda;
but it isn’t arrival that matters, rather
the ways we find to be whilst there: think
of survival on mountains…
THE LANGUAGE NEST
You
reason with our children in your mother’s tongue – gentle;
laughter flying like flags – whilst mine hefts
its weight as if in a wood chopping logs. When
I am done with working it, I
sit on the steps of the temple of
your conversation and let it float until
your words are clouds and, theirs? their
words are cloud shadows falling
across the fells of my nature; their
answers more than grace notes in
this counterpoint of curiosity. You
have made of them bright insects, buzzing,
as if the swarm of words gave warmth; a green light to the back of silence.
copyright © Andy Brown |