juxtaposition

by allen braden


— for Kevin Miller
 

Ice in a riverbed: a word
In your mouth: each remembers

The other. Your joy only
One reflection: the way grease

From a boy’s palm darkens
A page. Each time perishable

Freight thunders by, he feels
Hopeful: The girl he’ll leave

Flexes her calves deliberately
Every rung up a picker’s ladder

In Coup’s orchard by the river.
How can anyone make a living

Of departures: when crossing
The line can mean nothing

But distance, a vanishing point
Beyond which light won’t enter?

I mean when the river’s iced over
Horses, a few then hundreds,

Surge across: like one current
Over another: liquid and solid.

Come spring, quick thaw spells out
Sacrament: Or is that sacrifice?

 


“Juxtaposition” first appeared in Poetry International.

bird city

by allen braden


— for Jacob Green
 

Where sweetness is
The only nourishment.
Not a peaceable kingdom
For there is conflict here,
There is pain. But the bad
Inevitably are punished,
The good inevitably blessed.
Their stories, I suppose,
Have a storybook quality:
Peopled not with angels,
Not with true birds either
But rather creatures gifted
With a human fluency
And feathers apt as hands.
The magpie tending bar
Can wipe away troubles;
A seagull begging change
Is not really as down
On his feathery luck
As he’d have you believe;
Osprey redirect the flow
Of traffic for a parade.
Vendors give away candy
Shaped like children
And rich as ice cream.
Along these avenues
To the imagination,
The stacks of nests rise
Like columns of smoke
From ancient sacrifice,
Where any misery is given
The promise of flight
And where any broken
Wing may heal.

 


“Bird City” first appeared in The Colorado Review.

remembering precious landscape, but with an elegy in mind

by allen braden


Nevertheless the front yard, even the hawthorn,
flourished. Various roses built a windbreak,
all the catalpa petals splayed themselves open
and pollen splotched the limbs in gold profusion.

Suppose a woman lived there, a young wife,
her tanned arms dappled from whitewashing,
beautifying the wagon-wheel fence assembled
out of last century’s rumbling west for a better life.

Say years later, while kneeling in her rose and iris bed,
she happened to gaze toward the east forty
and witness the men in her family, at a distance,
circling and swinging their long-handled shovels.

They could’ve been mistaken, a hundred years earlier,
for threshers slapping chaff from the harvest.
They were in fact clubbing a wounded badger,
winnowing its blood into the furrows of stubble.

Now suppose that the iris have grown
wooden, their blues and lavenders blackened.
Razed down to the quick, her roses
promise to return. Prolific. Invasive.

 


“Remembering Precious Landscape, but with an Elegy in Mind” was first published in Elegy in the Passive Voice.

the venison book

by allen braden


1. Dressing

Once a practice handed down,
sticking its throat now frowned

upon by most sportsmen. Blood
will take care of itself. Just aft
of the breastbone with a blade
three whetted inches or more,

cut and continue as if unzipping
the abdomen which splits open
like a satchel packed neatly
with the contents of a lifetime.

From the unexpected profile
of a liver came Roman prophecy.
Imagine your own portents.
To empty the cavity with ease,

you may tip the carcass downhill.
Take care though not to nick any offal.
Into the next tiny room, carve a portal
when servicing the lungs, the heart

which loves to spoil if left intact.
Sever arteries and windpipe. Remove.
Let the buck’s antlers alone,
they’ll work as handles later

or tie a rope over the skull’s base,
a half-hitch around the snout.
Now get your rope or chain out,
hoist over a nearby branch or rafter.

Like a lover’s stockings, the hide
tugs off. No need for a knife.
Missed point to call this woods-
dressing undressing, instead of

hog-dressing, rough-dressing,
to gut, disembowel, eviscerate.
At last you may separate
the liceless cape and head

from the body if you wish
or saw the crown off its skull.

 

2. Deconstructing

With sinews and veins stripped
naked of such supple buckskin,

with a hatchet or cleaver,
split sternum, lengthwise,
in two. Pelvic girdle likewise.
Call this the H-bone and crack it

smack-dab down the center
to invent your own alphabet
for dialogue between the dead
and living. What does a blade

whisper to flesh but appetite?
Along a line envisioning the spine,
a hacksaw answers. Other bones
prove easy, especially the hinges

where hooves are defined
from each limb’s articulation.
With dead weight, the gantry
squawks. Never you mind

any sound but your own deliberate
breath. Quarter what remains
into shoulders, saddle, haunches.
Identify the use and cut of each:

neck and chuck, flank and shank,
the meaning drained away returns.
Next, wrap each with foil tight
for flavor then paper against frost.

Cold or salt or smoke cures most
kinds of impermanence for a time.
Treat with an iota of respect.
Collect what you’ve broken apart

and spoken into being. On thick white
butcher’s paper, mark your name.

 


“The Venison Book” was first published in A Wreath of Down and Drops of Blood.