Underneath The Clouds
Broken adventures moving against the
Stream:
This is my family,
And these are the few words I know-
And none of it belongs here:
These yards and houses do not belong,
Nor the airplanes leaping over them,
Nor the girls here
Who are shortly to be women: women,
Long-legged,
Bronzed women of a special cast-
They who will know their families like fishing
Leaping
Fast- fast:
Women of the year: women of a single snowflake
Evaporating underneath a single sun:
My words are just for her,
Women- my words are meant to be the flower
That signifies the metamorphosis of
Everything,
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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The Unabashed Bouquets
Upon the higher back of the albatross
It rains, it floods;
And if I am not beautiful by now,
I will be beautiful by then: I can see by the lights
That my father put in
As he whipped me, as I wrote the novels that no one
Reads,
I killed the dragon by which my friends were sewn
But never fed:
Beautiful irony of the butterfly crushed on the super
Fine roadway;
But I am no longer afraid: I still have my dreams,
By my scars,
By my liquor glass- I still have my friends,
Even if I should have died high up on the wild
Back of the buffalo,
Never read, by the red lips of wild flowers, the unabashed
Bouquets the dead Indians dead in the gutters
Of the old fashioned roadways: Again, I loved you,
Erin, but you are too busy serving the truancies of your
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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Her Three Untimely Swings
It feels to me that I am here,
In a candelabrum, in a sugar bowl- swimming around,
Looking out at the distortions of the dinner
Guests swimming like flies all around the caesuras of death
Which has them surrounded and out manned:
But for awhile they glow like goldfish in the midway of the greatest
State in all of America:
They glow like the fulcrum of Halloween, and they sing outside
Of the schoolyards and into churches,
Passing around:
Until they spill their own ways into monuments and dog tracks,
Until their particular unction takes hold
And they become fully developed the same way as metamorphosis
Or evaporation,
And the fingerprints you left on them like a lover’s evidence,
Disappear, or linger: and it is their shoulders that disappear
With their last names or whatever; while another
Thing even more lovelier than them gets up to
Bat at the plate of your breast work to take her three untimely
Swings.
poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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Ice Climbing
Send shivers to my loneliness.
Look at me with starving eyes,
The places where isolation roams
And imprints startling tracks in
The permafrost—
Show me your breath so that
I might find you
Outstretched like Prometheus’
Lover on a glacial step,
Your blooms the frigid
Chrysanthemums upon
Winter’s open sill.
There your soul is an ice sculpture,
Carved and held captive by
The Northern deities insured
No men will come and find you,
Hidden in the declivities,
Beneath the freeze framed falls
Of great longing, in the crystalline azure
Monoliths that rise up beneath
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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Your Crimes of Amnesia
Make love in your
Denouement
It is almost over and then
You’ll graduate,
Take off your water skis and
Eat warm meatloaf while
Looking across the celibate
Piano and down into the very
Strange lake from which you dried
Off and came from;
And tiny green apples will be growing
On the hill,
Filled with tiny green worms,
Like the vastly lesser children of your
First influence;
And you may grow pregnant living in
The loose swelter of your uncle’s
House,
But hijacked there are parks and
Cemeteries and bicycles that know the
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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Thundering Rains
Unicorns kindle like the virgins of green suicide:
You glide over the sight of me with the age old religious wound
In your side;
And now I will live in a house as old as a Bible, and I will
Flip through pictures of you while I call you from my window:
And the children will smoke out of the chimney stacks
From the decrepit factories where are they are working for
Profit:
And I will give them chalk drawings at their feet like colorful
Murder;
And I will kiss the young girls’ mouths just as they are coming
Into age,
Just like the blooming yet illegal tributaries of sharks with strange
Conjunctions,
And I will show them my fleet of paper airplanes:
Maybe I will make them say Sharon’s times like so many Hail Mary’s
Even while she falls in love with another man other
Than her husband once again in the soccer fields where she has
Surely been playing again and once again in the deeper
And heavier thundering rains.
poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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The Saints of Your Joy
Your daughter’s body was sick today, and I could not
Help it
With the customers coming in and buying corn fifteen for
A dollar until my parents painted over the sign:
And we watched each other while I carted around the
Green island fichus and sang the sweetness of
The theoretical mountains I keep you in,
Your brown body having its own prominences the size of
Dolls,
And I have desires of buying a bicycle, or taking you on
My shoulders to the island in the center of the
Lake Worth Lagoon,
But I am happy now that you don’t have time to read
The lies I’ve been singing you- Your young daughter is sick
And needs your attention,
But Sunday is her birthday and I am going to be glad to work
Your shift:
I’m going to work hard to find the work you named her after in
Spanish:
Heidi is her name, and she is your daughter, and her world will
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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Up In The Morning
Coming up in the morning,
Like a fish drowning- somebody’s
Swift sided pet,
Who has never seen trees or television
Channels which aren’t waving,
Like the séances
Of working girls, come in doors
Carrying their baskets for grandmother,
Not having anything else to sell-
They have to do this, work naked in the
Glowing kitchen,
Until they become that color, all tawny
And delivered,
Like ornaments in a tree house in a storm
In Delray;
Hot pies for thumbs, dimpled pillows,
Basins where a slender drip of water echoes
The loving jewelry taken off necks-
For both eyes, these are good, and it is morning
Once more, and I am swimming up
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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Their Silver-Purple Bodies
Spot on—the little immortality of the fairy nymphs—
Living like barrettes in your hair,
As you take them to school—even as you cannot figure out
What is happening,
And even as you shake out your long hair—
Even if the classroom is full of bullies, and the flea market
Underneath the overpass is filled with echoes—
This is your place:
All of the stewardesses are watching you and serving you
Drinkings—
As I think of the quieted places that must follow you home:
They are becoming more quiet,
As you become more forlorn—and the purple dragon-fly,
And the purple bowling alley—
And the purpled star in the sky hang over you like cousins—
It doesn't mean your safe—
Only that you can rest for awhile underneath the ceiling
Fans, to the grin of your Cheshire cats—
As the world of luminescent simulacrum spins around you—
Spinning, spinning—taking what is their's,
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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Then A Whisper Of A Sea
Subterfuge of romance, because what other sort
Of subterfuge is there: all at once running away from war,
Running into France,
Looking at her gondola underneath all of those soft lights of
Romance:
Looking up her body like along the soft pews on Sundays:
Looking along her body and seeing her secret rosaries; and kissing
Them,
And speaking to them as if they were a soda fountain of your
Unborn children,
While the sky just fumes: while it is packaged by cool jets;
While its bodies of seraphim divide to multiply, like schoolyards
Of tankards of jellyfish in the sea;
And I wish so many times that I was better at these amusements:
Wish that I was really taking off all of her diamonds of her old
Times and speakeasies:
And this is all she is, folding down like fresh laundry in the dorm room
Of her freshmen,
Trapping her like the innocent nuances of all of my neophytes:
A dime of blood, a ruby seed, a blushing point and then a whisper of
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poem by Bret R. Crabrooke
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