Brent Terry

Brent Terry

WHAT HAPPENS IN CHURCH

for Robert Wilcox, 3/9/1939–11/29/2017

Another mudfunked Sunday, singletrack tripping

nine miles through the leafdeep and flat

fall light, not tumbling, somehow, over rocks

or roots, lungs sucking sweet oxygen

from the crystal, heart thundering red diatribes

the cardinals marry their carols to.

Your head is mostly empty, but your legs are full

of zoom, so you hurdle without thinking

the fallen body of a birch, which Saturday late

in a carnival of wind, gave up its forever bending

and finally went for broke. You have no idea

if it fell in a tirade of roots ripping, its knotted

torso torn from glacial till, or if slipping

from soil, it let go this earth with a satisfied sigh.

You know only that you’ll never speak

the language of softwoods. You’ll never ease

the grieving of worms. The mushrooms build

their bookshelves where birch bark used to be,

recite the natural histories with tongues

of rot and flame. Leaves float down in a ringing

of bells that only the salamanders can hear.

You pluck one from the breeze, hold it to your ear.

—from Rattle #60, Summer 2018
Tribute to Athlete Poets

__________

Brent Terry: “I have been a runner since I was fifteen. For 40 years, laying down a patter of footfalls on asphalt, grass, or the soft and blessed dirt has been, as Eliot said, the coffee spoon of my days. I ran competitively in high school, college, and after, even competing professionally for a bit in my mid- and late-twenties. For years I celebrated each Thanksgiving and Christmas with a twenty-mile jaunt through still sleeping neighborhoods or drift-encrusted countryside. Birthdays were celebrated on the roads with friends, followed by beer and pizza. Nearly every occasion, big or small, has been marked by a run. Running brings treasured stretches of solitude: interludes of introspection and moments of slack-jawed wonder. It allows my friends and I to play like children again. Once upon a time I was a runner who wrote. Now I am most definitely a writer who runs. Either way, writing and running have always been married. The solitude provided by running gives poems time to form, shakes them loose and sets them tumbling around my brain. Oftentimes the rhythms of a run become the rhythms of the poem, the sights and sounds of a run become the images and songs of the poem. And the run offers escape from the desk, the seeming dead end of an uncooperative line. Running brings, as it always has, an animal joy, sense of freedom I have never found anywhere else, and I bring that animal, drunk on blood and freedom, home, where it continues to frolic and pounce, to sniff and howl from the white expanse of the page.”

Brent Terry

21st CENTURY AUTOIMMUNE BLUES

Even the flowers are trying to kill you.

Even the bread. Even the cells in your nails

conspire to drag your hands to your neck, enwrap

and enrapture your song-encrusted throat.

Your fingers make palpable the shadow

that seethes beyond the Earth’s voracious curve,

play the blues that stipple the tender flesh.

It’s a brand new year and histamines are all the rage.

Corticosteroids are the new black.

You’ve become allergic to yourself. It’s body

vs. antibody, that same tired tango,

and it’s way too late for dancing. Your twisted mister

blinks back from the bathroom mirror,

doesn’t bother to floss. Your future is encrypted

in the walls of your bone-vault, you bury your feelings

but have to admit that things are getting grave.

Whispers pass over your body like hands.

The tossed postures of your everyday

play shadowpuppets on the kitchen wall—Punch

and Judy headlining the Armageddon room.

So you spend what’s left of your youth laughing

until you cry. Your eyes itch. It’s just your body

trying to kill you to save you from yourself.

You’re caught between a rock and a hardly place.

You’re going to name your new band

Systemic Inflammatory Response. Your first album:

What’s been eating you lately?

Maybe it’s tick-borne. Maybe a fungus. Maybe

you’re a character in a DeLillo novel. Your affliction

is so postmodern. You’re so meta it’s killing you.

—from Rattle #53, Fall 2016
Tribute to Adjuncts

[download audio]

__________

Brent Terry: “The frustrations, both financial and professional, of being an adjunct have been widely discussed, if not seriously addressed, in the media over the past couple of years, and trust me, I feel those frustrations acutely, though I must say that as adjuncting goes, Eastern Connecticut State University and its English department do their best to assuage these frustrations. Just as an oyster needs the irritant provided by a grain of sand to make a pearl, sometimes a lack of comfort or respect can be the irritant an artist needs to produce important work. Surely being ignored by the academic establishment can both generate an affirming anger and reinforce the notion that the work itself is the important thing. This is certainly true in my case.”

Rattle: Poetry

… without pretension since 1995.

September 3, 2018

November 28, 2016