Joel Brouwer

Joel Brouwer was born in 1968 in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and holds degrees from Sarah Lawrence College and Syracuse University. His poems have appeared in AGNI, Chelsea, Crazyhorse, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and other magazines. He has held fellowships from the NEA, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation. Brouwer is the author of two books of poems, Exactly What Happened (Purdue University Press, 1999) and Centuries (Four Way Books, 2003). He teaches creative writing at the University of Alabama.

Aesthetics

Your brother has leukemia? Carve ivory. The elections were rigged? Write a villanelle. A girl shivers in streetlight, takes off her mittens, pulls a silver yo-yo from her pocket. Dogs bark behind a fence. Use oil on wood. Concentrate on pacing when choreographing your divorce; you will have to move through it forever. Two men in green fatigues tie a woman flat to a metal table. One has a rubber hose, the other a pliers. A third man arrives with sandwiches and a thermos. A body has soft and hard parts, like a piano. Music comes from where they meet.

Divorce

Got your letter. And the crate of dead crows. Are you trying to tell me something? Thought you might want to know—I’m taking a class on how to be a man. This week we learned that if you want to be one, you can’t be celery, a hotel room, or the Big Dipper. I raised my hand: How about a crow? The professor said, Good, good! How about a crow? We’re graded on participation. Yes, you can keep the clock. Will you please send my hands and feet? They’re in the nightstand, where you used to keep your fingers.

Hamartia Symbolized by the Stray

who cried at their tent flap. Dakota dawn.

Frost steamed in the stubble. Crazy Horse swung

his long chalk leg over a mountain, as if

he could ride it to safety. The dog stayed

and stayed. They told each other it was love.

Let’s review their errors so far. Crazy Horse

never claimed he could save anyone, least

of all himself. The hound loved leftover

beans and hashbrowns, not them. And they loved not

each other but figures of each other set

down each freezing evening in small notebooks,

his blue and hers red, while the flashlight lashed

to the tent’s crown with twine swung above them,

a metronome slowing down the tempo.

And burrowing down into the sleeping bags

they’d zipped into a single downy pouch.

And the sprays of hard white stars which bit down

on the charred November sky so soon to

snow while the stray searched the packed earth beneath

the picnic table once more before sleep.

And chocolate shakes from General Custard.

Bright green cress torn dripping from icy streams.

That no one in the world knew where they were.

Hen-of-the-woods hissing in the skillet.

The valiant rustbucket they rode in on

and trusted they’d ride back out. All of these

and more but not, it would eventuate,

each other, an error which would soon initiate

their slow etiolation, foreshadowed here

by wet green wood that would not catch, ink blanched

in rain, and gray leaves snapping underfoot

like glass eyes. Blind Crazy Horse’s errant

arrow made a bridge and the stray lay down and

died on it. They covered it with a jacket

and told each other at least it didn’t suffer.

But the arrow groped on toward its mark.

“Kelly, Ringling Bros. Oldest Elephant, Goes On Rampage”

—The New York Times, February 3, 1992

Her reasons for snapping seem clear: barbed tip

of the whipcord, squirming toddler cargo

glopping Sno-Cone on her back, cramped freight cars,

stale hay, the vet’s incessant vitamin shots…

Or maybe it was boredom. Think of all the circles

she wore into the earth. Twenty-seven years of plod,

orbiting the ringmaster’s megaphoned jokes

while squads of ballerinas dug their heels

into her spine. Perhaps it wasn’t pain

but repetition: the routine—balance beachball

on trunk-tip, wag ears—as sure and dull

as gravity. The question then is not why

but why today? Why this exact instant to rage

through the bleachers, tossing clowns like peanut husks,

sending dozens of kids to nightmare clinics?

What spark or fulcrum, what sudden volition

rose like a bubble through her four tamed tons

and burst in her meaty head?

After all, means of escape are always

at hand. Nothing remarkable

about shotgun triggers or train tickets,

the hard part is when to use them.

You yourself, right now, with a few

well-placed blows, could knock your world down

to the pile of boards it started as,

pick up a hammer and begin again from scratch:

move to Phoenix, raise cattle, change your name.

The brittle unbearable rests in your palm.

Will you close your fist or won’t you, and why?

They shot her forty times before she died.

The Spots

Appeared to her in Massachusetts. Purple and green.

And immediately

vertigo rushed up like an angry dog

to a fence. She went white, fell down the well

of herself and wept.

Late at night, in the motels, when she’d fallen

asleep, I cried too. I whispered curses to the awkward stacks

of white towels. Hating anything out of balance. Hating

her, her new failure. In the mornings

my checkbook voice returned, low and soft. For an angry dog

whose yard you wish to cross.

We both hated my balance, hated her imbalance, needed each.

Sudafed acupuncture ear candle.

Yoga chewing gum Zoloft Chinese tea.

She was afraid of going blind. She constantly described

colors and shapes, as if I had gone blind.

They turned orange. They floated. They darted.

We went arm in arm without passion, like elderly French.

Internist neurologist ophthalmologist.

Otolaryngologist neurologist psychiatrist.

She would not allow the warm towel over her face in the MRI.

The nurses seethed. She set her jaw and vanished

into the gleaming white tube. The machine banged like hammers

on a sunken ship’s hull. She listened to Beethoven through headphones.

The magnetism passed through her mind in waves,

like wind through chestnut trees, touching

everything and changing nothing. Her courage! If courage

is what stones have. My God, how I loved her. Badly.

The spots were like metaphors. They told us something

by showing us something else. And so I believed they were metaphors.

They were not.