​

​RISING AND FALLING
by Jeff Hardin

 

As trails go, they should come
                         with a guide
             who practically leaps from himself

to uncover the first green leaves
                         of Toothwort
             and Spring Beauty and almost

weeps for the Dutchman’s Breeches
                         and places his hand
             along fallen trees as if

to comfort them back to the earth.
                         “The moss is having sex,”
             he’ll say, bending to breathe

across sporangia. How else know,
                         without his pointing,
             the reason for lichen, the placement

of scat? Some vines for more

                         than three hundred years
             have risen with trees to come back

down with them and then to rise again.
                         His own voice ascends
             and descends and brushes the leaves

from the roots of sycamores,
                         and when three turtles
             climb from the pond to sun

along a thin limb angled upward,
                         his own neck
             will seem to elongate,

as if in sympathy, and you, too,

                         will find yourself, in earnest,
             moving toward the season’s last sun.

​

DARK MATTERS LOVE POEM

by Bill Brown

 

      Outside locusts chirr,
a thousand tiny engines.
The air itself would plug
its ears if it had the will
to pull empty hands
from its pockets.

​

      A golden sun lounges
on the horizon and disappears
before anyone gathers it
into the egg basket.

​

      The magic hen that laid it
rushes the edge of the universe
toward somethingness.

​

      Tonight the air is filled
with a veil of dark matter
the atom smasher can't find.

​

      Even the American toads
have ceased their mating calls,
and the barred owl is holding
court at forest edge.

​

      It's a night when every
sentence should start with hark,
and an oracle should step forward
and say the news is grief-filled
and good people suffer and die.

​

      As the sky slumbers, I am
glad that you stay so close--
even if I can't see your face,
I feel your breath rising
in your chest, and if I still
my heart, I can hear you dream.​

​

COLLAGE
by Sandy Coomer

​

Remember how we used to sit in the sun
and invite light into our skin, cooled
by a west wind teasing the beech trees?
You would say something sharp –
about politics, about global warming
or corporate greed, about how God would hate
the religion we name to excuse our wars.
And I would think about your voice
as it rides the dips and ridges of your convictions,
and the way you pause, let the words rise
as high as they can before gravity loops them,
pulls them down with your solemn nod.
Once we walked through the woods
near the lake and you named
the turtles and ducks their proper names –
Red-Eared Slider, Lesser Scaup –
as if to speak of them less formally
would somehow take from them
their earned status, their justified honor.
I told you how I make birds
with torn paper, glue each strip down
on canvas, irregular and amorphous,
until the shape of the bird pushes out
from within the layers, I offered each one
a moniker for its wings – Beauty, Memory, Joy –

and you nodded as if it was a royal thing I did,
creating from the leftovers, the rubble,
like we all do every day when we wake.
Today I sit on the floor and the morning sun
presses warmth like a quilt across my legs.
I read your poems again, lifting them
off the page with your remembered voice.
Again, I’m struck with how beauty
is sometimes unbearable, how certain words
tear the breath from me, and others sew
the wounds, each piece of me reclaimed
in the silence.

​

ELEMENTAL 

by Bill Brown

What the river says, that is what I say

                                 --William Stafford

I.

On the Tellico River, rocks that shape
the water's flow grow smooth and undercut
by this myriad force. At night, shadowed
by sycamore and birch, wherever current
brushes stone, shivers a glow. Light from 
distant stars and our squat moon shimmers
Bald River Falls, perhaps tricks natural
selection and our mammalian optic nerve
to accept this magic as just an evening
beside a mountain stream the Cherokee
claim as holy.

​

II.

Memory changes the narrative: 
Your grandmother teaching you
how to tight-line fish without a cork. 
It's in the feel of the pole, the line tension--
what's in the water on the other end--
the slight lift of wrist when the jerk comes--
all with early willow green--how it can't 
be separated in the moment-the elements--
stone outcrop, light in trees, the river--
how an old woman made of flesh commands
such resolve--flesh, mostly water, mineral--
light and shadow, brushstrokes in the eyes, 
nuance of voice. My father loved Rivers 
as much as Jesus--the Buffalo, the Duck, 
the Caney Fork, the Tennessee, time there, 
earthly sacraments of something he knew eternal. 
Why so much hoodoo about heaven 
when the river and this life demand our praise.

III.

River, how rain pocks your moving surface--
little rings swirling just enough to confuse
the clouds, as tall reeds at your bank form 
green sleeves. And how polished rocks 
beneath the shallow shoals sing for you.
My wife cracked the windows and your
breeze-song entered sleep like camphor,
as if night held seashells to our ears. You
are blind to what my eyes gather from your
surface, and yet I use the second person 
as if you understood my syllabic babble. 
But you speak a language old as stone.
I sit on your bank and glimpse the everlasting, 
as a moon rises red through dark limbs, 
turns yellow, and brightens every eddy 
and current swirl--a moon you can draw
water from, its lunar drift in every pail.

​

AN APPROXIMATE CHRONOLOGY OF REASONS

by Kory Wells

 

                      Look, the light quit leaking out already.
                      —Bill Brown, “Dial 911”

 

First the astonishing light,
round and beckoning, the nipple,
the mouth of his straight-backed mother,
how it curved with her eyebrows,
the spark in her eyes when
he sounded his first words. Papa.
Mama. Bubba. Ball. Later, click
of slick marbles, magic coins
his uncle pulled from his ear,
each body in motion another question.

Then his wonder
at buttons and doorknobs,
delicate twist of transistor dial,
the gravity of letters and numbers,
the curve of so many vowels, those sassy
6s and 9s, the double delight of 8s
and capital Bs. The names
of the planets, and the planets’ moons,
how their orbits, imperfectly round, wobbled
even as his universe grew.

His gratitude for little pleasures—
fresh peaches and blueberries,
the smooth breast of his lover,
her curls softer than a feather crown.
A tidy nest of bluebird eggs,
dandelions and pinecones,
loamy path around the lake
where the Earth whispers all knowledge.

But also the dying sun, scorched pan,
flat tire, rotting hedgeapple,
detonated grenade. He can’t forget
the fatal roundness of a single bloody clot.
Trembling hands on the telephone dial,
the round receiver with its tiny holes.

And so the dark matter, the sorrowful voids.
Missile silos. Toxic holding ponds.
Drive-by shooting victims. The homeless.
Our leaky souls. You can patch this hole, he says,
and his sphere of compassion envelopes us.
We believe. We too have dialed 911.
On the first ring, he answered.

​

TONIGHT WIND TRAPS ME WITH ITS SOUND

by Bill Brown

​

Eaves creak,
     twigs bat the windows,
a long soft howl builds inside.
     Love, stay sound in your slumber 
and let me bear alone 
     the timbre of coming rain, 
how first drops 
     against the window 
collect and run 
     like an old man's tears, 
quiet and too dear to wipe away.

​

      A neighbor's horse speaks
to the night, 
     and story enters
an otherwise threadless dark-- 
     memory, a coin purse of moments, 
loosens its clasp. 
     A brother appears
and Nell, his mare 
     with an infected shoulder boil.
With such tenderness 
     he rubbed salve on her running sore.

​

A mind loses for decades 
     events and practices 
that were once dear. 
     And now, I'm old man nobody 
on a sleepless April night, 
     thankful for a history,
how joy and sorrow join hands 
     like twins on a swing set, 
the past's constant sweeping, sweeping.
     Rain ends and begins again.
I hear a horse gallop in the pasture--
     perhaps an equine act of worship. 
If not, I'll claim it as my own.

​

THE HAMMOCK OF THE HAMMOCK SPIDER

by Georganne Harmon

 

She's built it to last

and it has

through drying heat

thunderous rain

a hurricane

that sprawled and overturned

our human homes

but not hers.

Gossamer, silk woven 

from spinnerets (spinnerets!),

a horizontal sculpture 

now hanging

against the glass door,

the garden beyond,

and has, I sense

something to say to me

each morning.

I sit and look, my coffee

steaming, today's book 

not yet opened.

 

Some sign wavers

in today's slight breeze,

weather cooling here

 between seasons--

her seasons so clearly defined,

mine hidden in hope.

Why have I not seen it before?

 

Only now am I drawn 

to what has always been 

calling my attention:

this elaborate art of life:

nourishment and disappearance.

I am drawn, here with

my eggs, my coffee,

to her silent monument 

where two flies lie in state, 

a meal no longer needed.

Now the hammock trembles,

almost a gentle sigh

where I would be

ever-willing 

to lie.
 

OUR DEATH

by Bill Brown

 

     You’ve been dead
almost as long as you lived,
    and still birds
eat black oil at the feeder,
    the little house
you built when I was twelve.
    Like everything dead,
it is falling apart. Cardinals
    and finches
don’t mind. Today, ideas flit
    in and out
like blowing leaves, maple and gum.
    They cover
the ground as I try to pick the one
    I need to
hold me here. I lie in them and,
    they crush
beneath my hips—I become a museum
    pharaoh, my chin
sticks out, my nose points to the sky,
    my eyes almost
blind to the circle of buzzards scouting
    for carrion. 
Some days just focus on winter and death—
    no God
would argue with physics, not in the solstice
    month when
shorter days blink by, feed on memories—
    a father dead,
a feeder’s decay. Leaves make their own bed,
    and I lie in it.
Today the Goddess of December relies
    on these infant
needs—suck—warmth—touch—always
    touch, as I
fondle dry veins of maple with fingertips,
     my own death
buried beneath me, and daydream how
    your whiskers
rubbed my cheek when I was young.

​

UPON DEATH

by Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum

 

I would like to have been a bird,

A small black one with white

Speckles along the spines of my feathers,

Those always seen in large number

Picking seed on the hillsides

From between the billion blades

Of grass. I would like, Lord,

To have been a member of my flock

Who could fly from pine to elm

To oak to wire from temple

To steeple to bridge, no yes

No maybe no yet, only this rise

And fall from earth to sky

And back again as if led

By one mind, a single spirit

Eternal, a life shared

By my multitude—Mother,

Father, Sister, Wife, Neighbor,

Husband Boss, Cousin, God, My God,

Make me one before I try to fly.​​​​​​​​​​

​

Bill Brown is the author of twelve poetry collections and a writing textbook, Important Words, on which he collaborated with Malcolm Glass. In 1999 Brown wrote and co-produced the Instructional Television Series, Student Centered Learning, for Nashville Public Television. Brown directed the writing program at Hume-Fogg Academic High School in Nashville for 19 years. His philosophy that those who write live more examined lives fostered a love of words in generations of students. He retired from Hume-Fogg in May 2003 and accepted a part-time lecturer’s position at Peabody College of Vanderbilt University. In 1995 the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts named him Distinguished Teacher in the Arts. He has been a Scholar in Poetry at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, a Fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and a two-time recipient of Individual Artist Fellowships in poetry from the Tennessee Arts Commission. In 2011 the Tennessee Writers Alliance awarded Brown Writer of the Year. He continued to do consultant work and lead writing workshops until the day he died.