Airmail

EDWARD BRASH

AIRMAIL

Is it useful to stare as I am over the spread top-

boughs of a shade tree at the white buildings

with black window trim on the upper floors beyond?

Between the attack of the city and the rest of hills

where is my poetry made? I have been at it ten years

and cannot answer. My poetry has been a search and not

a walking around. There is much to say for the broad river,

how it bends and usurps what it passes over, not perfecting

but perfect itself; how it cuts a broad swath,

walks widely, spills and eddys, hesitates but never stops.

I've tried to spear the single thing, to plunge and rise

with my hand around it prize-like from another world.

My eyes have been violent microscopes. So attached to a specimen

vision fails. The violent locomotion of emotion barrelling

through the system, escaping the depot, fouling suburbs

is the dream of my hand-cart poetry. Yet even now I persist; I

return and polish, afraid of the awkward or incomplete, instead

of bullying or bluffing it through with the firm unworry

of another magician. Perhaps I shall not escape my frame or the

precious habits

small men affect to be at any rate elegant. An object

seen through the window-glass-its inches, colors, feeling,

smell-

is not worth the effort; it is the wind that combines all things,

swims like a river, roars like a train, royal and plain,

here it caresses, there it rips like struck lightning, shivers

a candle, plows telephone poles deep into concrete;

it possesses all things but is unpossessed, is more like speech

than any word and more like me than the restrained syllables

of my poetry. I burn the house and watch its contents disappear

into superb confusion overhead; what smoke households make!

II