V E R S E and I M A G E

A lawn of families;

beach house, beach clothes,

each evening a glissando

of guitar pulling down the sun.

Down to the sea we run,

the gulls waving to us;

this year, next year,

our interchangeable faces.

Our interchangeable places:

flashy beach house,

seaworn motel, not one

here just two decades ago.

Here until the next big blow

takes it all back,

a wavebeat,

between two stormfronts.

Still we hope for those scents

of another summer, salt tang

and iced coffee; the clang of horseshoes

and one more beer, one more wave to ride.

Yes, here’s to that roller-coaster ride,

another year with a son

growing, growing

toward his own summer time.

Maybe that’s why we like rhyme,

like rock and roll, that repeat

and repeat; simple

pleasures you can count on:

Wet bathing suits that hang on

a line of laughter,

outboard motors in a chorus

that rides the surf of a backbeat.

from This Art of Losing, BrickHouse Books, Baltimore, MD; © 2011

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One hundred sixty-one square foot off-grid UK vacation rental: I’m picturing myself there while I wait here in reception for the endodontist to drill my father’s molar. By my eyeball reckoning, this space I occupy is 10 times that cabin, 1601 square feet. Here there’s free wifi to be slurped up from the Eye Center next suite over; here 80’s soft rock continuum; here high pitched whines through poorly muffled walls, your free hearing test while you wait.

There near the cabin birds sing from bushes while the woman wheels her gear and provisions down the trail in a child’s red wagon. Through the door, walls mostly windows, narrow mattress in a loft, ingenious shelving. No electric, no phone. What would I pack? Fresh ground, not instant, and my self-contained backpacking filter? Titanium 1 liter pot and little brass stove with a pint of Everclear 190, wonderful dual use distillation? (Fuel and hand sanitizer, or what else might you be thinking?) Vegetables I’ve dried for rehydration; miso and peanut butter and don’t forget chocolate?

All this I imagine as I scroll through photos and read the article in my Apple News feed. Feed, apt name for the pressurized flow each time I open my phone. Not unlike a late night procedure relegated to us interns on the wards: snort of xylocaine gel in the nostril, slide the large-bore tube up and then waggle down behind the soft palate, on down and down until we hear stomach gurgles from a syringe-full of air; now hang a pre-digested bag of amino acids, simple sugars, fat emulsion & vitamins like turbid gray cyborg milk and watch it drip.

I’m sated. Stop the drip. Take me off the grid. I can do without calls, texts, alarms, and I’ll vow to make do without keyboards and uploads. Books on paper. These poems by Brad Strahan with their muse reaching out. And don’t forget college-ruled and a ballpoint – the ultimate back to nature.

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Bradley Strahan has lived and taught and written all over the world and his poems are a world of imagery and metaphor. His collection This Art of Losing is a night train through Germany, a bridge across the Seine, a girl with neon eyes in Amsterdam, rain through an open window in Macedonia. The atmosphere of place is very strong, but even though one of the section titles insists Not Philosophy these poems are all philosophy; place is simply the door through which metaphor enters and sits down across the table.

Losing what, and why dwell on it? Truth washes up on the reefs of the real. These poems often present as a careful observation or description – they are arresting in their rich musical language, internal rhyme, and stark novel imagery – but each conceals a deeper metaphor. The passage of time; what it conceals and what we grasp to reclaim; the time before us drawing short as we face our inevitable mortality – these are the cold nuclei of our reality. If we ignore them we walk through life as through blue mist. Brad is not morbid in his quest to discover reality but he never turns aside. And the realities that may grant our existence deeper pleasure are like these poems: to be held close, turned over and back, to be fully delved and known.

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Eyes blink.

No, I don’t understand.

But truth,

truth is a weary traveler

and what we say

flies out the window

to next in her hair.

The muse,

silly girl, runs

through our hands like light

through window panes,

like drops

down the window

when it rains.

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Among the souvenirs

of a life of art

what part has

the art of life?

Where

in this magic act

does the magician

exist?

on what rope

over the Niagara

of history

do we cross

as we toss

our baggage

piece by piece

into the flood?

The blood alone

remembers

autumn’s flames

in late December.

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Water is laughter, children

running through an empty house,

a phantom guitar heard

in cottonwood shade.

A thread of music weaves

green verses on bleached cloth,

a chorus of crows. Willows sigh,

feet resting in bright water.

You can hear frogs. Insects sing

as a thousand songs hover

just out of reach

like an iridescent dragonfly.

We lie on grassy banks

singing the same old words,

a green song in a land

of brass and hard blue silence.

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Let me wrap this day in cloud,

press it between boards of pewter –

matte pages of lake hammered by rain.

It will be a whole volume of rain.

The pages will open with thunder

and the sound of water beating on metal.

It must show how church bells rang

with such a hollow clang, hardly heard

against the shouting of sky and water.

There will be a line of birds, waterfowl

swimming through a sky of clouds

as if it was just another river.

For a frame there is a wash of mist

and almost hidden there

the darker forms of hulking mountains.

But in one corner, a balcony, an iron rail,

a gray poet hammering away

while one lone birds sings far better.

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