A Witness to Your Life
She is wife to the husband,
Keeper of memoirs he will never write,
The exposed and the secret-sharer.
Even with life so small, unkempt,
Littered with rude manners and perfumed breath.
Later, if he saved the drowning boy
Or pulled the soldier out of the burning building
Or calmed the man full of slurs and bad skin,
It will only be that ordinary people
Often do extraordinary things.
She will remember this sometimes
Walking along the street into a familiar scent,
Passing a store window draped with colors be used to wear.
When she steps barefoot onto the beach,
How it burned his feet,
How he put on his sandals
She brought for him
And continued on his way.
| 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. |
An utterly disarming finale to a book, a work so accomplished I’m at a loss for words to give it the praise it deserves. Michael H. Brownstein will be a poet sung for ages to come.
ReplyDeleteThank you for such a great compliment. Thank you again for republishing the book on your blog. .
ReplyDeleteFor Michael, Maik, Bob, Ralph, Roger, Geoffrey, André, Paul, Ed, and other poets new or old or unknown, I highly, highly recommend this New York Times article about the poem, “One Art,” a villanelle, by Elizabeth Bishop: “19 Lines That Turn Anguish Into Art” (by Dwight Garner and Parul Sehgal, June 18, 2021). The article points out that Dylan Thomas’ poem “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” is also a villanelle, and Sylvia Plath’s “Mad Girl’s Love Song.”
ReplyDeleteThanks to Bob Boldt for a link to YouTube for readings of "One Art," and for a lesson on the villanelle form of poetry!
DeleteWhat a beautiful poem, Michael. I read it at dawn today, before driving out of the desert as Hilary approaches. It has stayed with me all morning. A wonderful tribute to the endurance of memory and personhood.
ReplyDeleteOMG, Eric! How did I fail to include "Eric" in my comment above "For Michael, Maik, et al."? But you probably know more about the villanelle form than all of the rest of us combined (except possibly Bob Boldt).
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