All Over the Place: “Beginnings” from The...Other Poems

By Michael H. Brownstein

5AM and I’m working on a computer allergic to attachments and has a mouse in need of serious training; every now and then Microsoft Edge opens and closes a window as if the computer has a bad case of hiccups; spellcheck takes a visit elsewhere; and the screen is too dim—my cataracts may be getting worse….
    The second section of my Katy Trail book was requested by Amy Huffman, the editor of A Kind of Hurricane Press. I offered her a wide variety of writing and she decided ultimately what she would want to publish. Of course, I was flattered by her choices and, figuratively speaking, took the walk with her into the next section of the book. No more Katy Trail narrative.
    “Now,” she said, “poems to read over and over again to enjoy and contemplate.”
    Enjoy.

Beginnings

You know everything has its own inherent qualities. Mine are to be deep and hard to cross.

     —King of the Ocean to King Rama in Phi Kah Phi Lam

FIRST

I have the strangest dreamslide.

Images slip like smiles through landscapes

of fence and caressed brush.
I never imagined a line of hose could stretch so far
or that I could run as fast as the spray of water.

Everywhere is a story sky
and the Tree of Life misplaced in the Garden of Eve
comes to seed as stock root reinventing itself after the picking,
comes to fruit like the head of Bathala after the burying.

Look to the herb bunched with yellowed fingers.
Study the face of the coconut.
Find the slits in the bamboo.
Seek out the crevices in rock and cave.

And the tears of the lonely giant
drip into wings, feather into birds,
fly to the bamboo in the first valley
attracted to each other, attracted to quiet song.
They have not yet found voice to sing,
but they are hungry for it, finding softness
in the hardest of bamboo.
Malakes and Maganda
slide to wholeness.
As a gift to freedom, the first People
give to the birds the first songs. So it is and
so it is for later and later.

Everything has order,
the luck of Kannon and the Elephant God,
the blue mist of the Weaver Maid.
Bathala looks like us.

SECOND

this crossing of stars
a slicing of moon
the one friend of Bathala
someone else I will never meet.

THIRD

I’m thinking we’re thinking we’re someone else.
_______________
Acknowledgments: Poems in “Other Poems” were published in the following journals: Poetry Super Highway, "SCR" (a small press journal), Avatar Review, Bryant Literary Review, The Pacific Review, Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, In Posse Review, and American Letters and Commentary.

Copyright © 2013, 2023 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.