Four Poems by John Brantingham

 

Since COVID

 

the mall has all been emptied out,

but even before that the long hallways

branching off toward where Sears

 

or May Company had been were darkening,

casting into shadow those places

where thirty years ago

 

you were working out the complicated game

of flirting and with it, love.

You wonder how teenagers find each other now.

 

It has to do with cell phones and computers,

and from the outside it seems

that they’ve found a way to make sex

 

even lonelier than the anonymous bar pickup,

which is an achievement in its way.

You think you could hide in the cold darkness

 

of one of the back alleys inside a mall.

You think about how much darker and colder

it must feel for them, but love is still with us.

 

You wish you could show them all

what love means, but you know

the last thing they need is you.

 

Grass Farm

 

The place down the road

used to be a farm

I think

 

maybe 50 years ago,

but the only thing

the owner grows

 

now is a grass lawn

maybe a quarter mile out

and across.

 

On Saturdays, he rides

his mower all morning,

all the way out to the back

 

to the treeline edge

fighting it back,

cutting down everything

 

including the sapling birches

that would swallow

his land back into the woods.

 

Sometimes on a weekday morning,

I’ll be down there

on a walk and look across

 

all that grass and spot a white tail deer

standing just on the edge of it,

looking too intimidated

 

by all that open space

to step out.

I know how it feels.

 

That field seems sacred

to the man on his mower.

The woodchucks

 

don’t venture out on it.

Neither do I or even the man

when he’s done with his weekly chore.

 

All the Way at the End of August

 

All morning long,

frogs have haikued themselves

into puddles along the trails

while my shoes have had

to slurp themselves free.

 

The highest birch leaves

breeze-quiver yesterday’s raindrops

onto the leaves below them,

but not all the way down to me.

 

The sunlight here has been filtered

through layers of leaves,

and my world is about as green as it gets.

 

Tomorrow there will be rain.

In a month, these leaves

will begin to autumn.

 

However, I’ve decided

to reside in this moment

for the rest of time.

 

 

They’ve All Gone Away Now

 

Out on a footpath along the Allegheny

I come to the remnants of the cabins

 

people used to drive to before they moved

the road maybe fifty years ago.

 

This place where my grandparents, father,

uncles, and aunts used to come

 

when they were all a young family.

They’re all gone now except for my father

 

who was the baby of that generation.

I wonder if he’d remember the place by

 

the half toppled-over chimney and foundation

stones. I wonder if he’d remember the stream

 

running by as the one he’d spent an afternoon

damming up when he was seven years old

 

and there was no one young enough to play with.

I wonder if he’d recognize the descendants

 

of the frogs he caught or the smell of birch.

Later, I might call him, and talk to him

 

about this place, or maybe I won’t. Maybe

we’ll talk baseball or politics and I’ll let

 

the bucolic spaces of his long ago memory

hibernate quietly at the base of his skull,

 

feeding him, reminding him

that there are perfect spaces on this earth.

John Brantingham was Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks’ first poet laureate. His work has been featured in hundreds of magazines. He has nineteen books of poetry and fiction including his latest, Life: Orange to Pear (Bamboo Dart Press). He lives in Jamestown, New York.