All Over the Place: Michael’s Story

By Michael H. Brownstein

I was raised on a farm with no indoor plumbing

and her long strands of rainbow and leprechaun glitter slides down her back.

Let’s remember Michael, she says.

This is not the story of my life.

Sometimes the heart of a smile is in its spray of joy and jasmine;

other times, silver beacons, clear weather smooth.

This is a love poem that ends badly,

a death song chanted and varnished, hung to the heavy air of distemper,

trolled through unforgiving, indifference, lust and cruelty.

Black ice scowled the curve of the highway.
Michael’s pick-up truck could not hold on.
They found him in the morning in a field of ice
dead and frozen, his head unmarked,
the doors easily opened.

Her eyes pastel shaded and easy,
blue with flecks of grey and brown,
a brightness waking the neighbors at rooster’s calling.

I wish to remember Michael, she says,
his kind hands and blistered fingers,
his long feet and narrow knees,
his way of talking without an accent
his way of touching my hair with fairy dust.

Audrain County,
deer run across fields of energy
dissolve into stars when night covers the moon.
There is a legend that tells us when the deer bed with the dawn,
it’s their watchfulness that brings the sun to this side of the world
and their wakefulness that sets it to sleep.

Love poems are made of trite blocks,
walls that climb vines to places common.
“I took a line for a walk,” Miro said,
and Franquois Boucher complained nature
“is too green and badly lit,”
and when the vines circle backwards
to the painter of serpents with human heads,
the artist Hugo Van der Goes
went insane on a walk to Cologne,
a blaze of virus entering his Garden of Eve.
All of this created within love.

She has a brother and sister of the dawn,
well lit and satisfied,
and she can run with the best of them
and lead the herd to safety
always.

So love goes.

Copyright © 2022 by Michael H. Brownstein Michael H. Brownstein’s volumes of poetry, A Slipknot Into Somewhere Else and How Do We Create Love?, were published by Cholla Needles Press in 2018 & 2019, respectively.