in parentheses

S. T. Brant is a teacher from Las Vegas. Pubs in/coming from EcoTheo, Door is a Jar, Santa Clara Review, Rain Taxi, New South, Green Mountains Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Ekstasis, The Common Breath, 8 Poems, a few others. You can find him on Twitter @terriblebinth or Instagram @shanelemagne.

Artwork by Edward Michael Supranowicz

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The Fields of Poetry

We are fields of Poetry.
What do you think of weeds?
The shepherd brings their sheep to graze;
there isn’t training for their being.
There is no preference for feeding,
the sheep will eat all they’ll eat
Then leave. Predilection of the flock.
Some are fasting,
others fattening,
Knowing soon that there’s a shearing,
for the weather in the hills.
We are many fields, many poems.
Is it always the same shepherd?
What about the sheep? Nothing wills repeat
in our meadow full of poesy.

Lone Mountain

The desert in the night is cold.
The night has impulses all its own,
And you obey them as you’re told;
when they haunt you with the sea
You’ve never seen, you can hear the sea in the mountains.

I am an old man.
I have wasted my life.
Imagination mistook me for a god;
I mistook myself for one.
But I am timid.
I am old. I have wasted my life.

The Frost and Froth of Life

The flowers still are with Life frosted. The hues!
The blooms!
The spring in winter is singing unsuppresssedly,
On darkling wings
My dancing is delivered the tune that fills the
darkness, further filled
By the wanting of my lover and the maenads:
Come, O Persephone,
Come, O Queen of Spring and Living!

These voices are a field of daisies!-
weeds-
they spring unstoppably
From a salted land, O they are the flowers of the air
standing spitefully
Upon allergic land, O there is no death, there is a
withering to Word!
The ocean is a speech! The waves, letters!
Water’s god! The lights
That are known going down this hill; they are to me
The eyes of seas yet to be,
Letters speaking to me not their sound but an
infinite alphabet
Of symbols unseen, marks more ancient than all sound
that predate god back to melody:
What Chaos sang beautifully, capriciously,
O some letters borne
Of a bleeding music her sister muse pricked from her,
that mock Calliope.
I see the beginning of all things in the lights
that are the sea
That are the waves engulfing me
with their new
And god-song singing! I can sing it all;
I have swam
In the wet of vowels, consonant gulf,
all of language has enlaced me!…
This one tongue has pooled divinity…
an ocean is a drop-
god!
My life is a dripping faucet of it All. Bland power!
Lifeless life! O

On Fire

How to live? how this life? how all things that
through intensity
Supersede their words to become Life, thus
become the question
This inquisition hopes to land?

Fire. There must be some that burns the living
from your heart
And leaves you ashèd, dead with only the unslain
essence of that thing,
Unworded, unideal, to exist beside you, a lily
purgatorially bloom’d,
You pick and buttonhole into your soul, to periapt
through a falsely outward
Life flaneuring deep within, dispassionately
tethered to life.

Do Not House Me Indistinguishably Among the Rubble

I am no match for Life!-
shadows, O deny me not some life
of you: I am your element or I am not home.
I will embark on Life abroad a pitied hospitality.
Shine! O heat,
Substance, O
This is a phantom host that roams this life, a gust
That tickles worlds.
Such a force! that equals to an itch. Neither shade
Nor shoal’d, no
Soulful vessel sits aground; neither life recruited to
singly soldier this middleground.
Life is this limbo’d home; a house between
conflicting sides,
live or die!
O if only one would
from this nothingness
uncamp me.