Sample Poems by Brent Terry
Sentiment, Not Sentimentality
for Doug Bauer
for Paul Eberle
Go ahead, weep if you want.
Sob. Keen. Howl Spanish curses at French nuns
on a Swedish bus crawling across New Mexico
like a bug. Like a silver centipede on a skateboard
at noon, under a sky obscene in its beneficence.
Mother told me never to trust a sky like that.
Told me my father was a sky like that, and
we all know how that picnic turned out.
Use the word sorghum in a sentence.
Mother would write my name in my underwear "just in case."
It's noon and the landscape is jagged
and endless and red, bits of green scattered here and there
as if someone had disemboweled the earth
and the earth had just eaten a salad.
Because I'm crying on a motorcycle, the earth-
guts look like a DeKooning--abstract,
yet in one corner a hint of a figure presides.
Orange bed. Mountain with coyote. Nuns exclaiming.
Otherwise it's just shapes and squiggly lines playing
connect-the-billboard from here to Denver,
where the nuns visit the Mint and all my former lovers
meet each Tuesday for tea and embarrassing stories.
Embarrassing for me, that is, except
I'm not even there, so why be embarrassed,
and besides, when I'm drunk I recount vividly
how each of their faces contorted while coming.
The little monkey noises.
So, who's embarrassed now?
East of the Rockies, the roadside is littered with Nebraskas.
Iowa's guts are sutured and healing nicely.
Des Moines. DuBuque. Davenport.
What is sorghum and how is it used?
I stop for gas and a candy bar at a station next to a river.
The parking lot's an insurrection of toads.
It's hard not to squish them, hard not to want to.
I am paralyzed before the candy case.
The radio says sorghum prices are down.
Our Grandfathers fought in the war,
so now all roads lead to Hershey, Pennsylvania.
The nuns clamber back onto the bus, one
munching a Reese's, mumbling of toads and plagues,
though in French it sounds sort of sexy.
Dieu is a dominatrix with garters
under Her habits, a wooden ruler,
and don't even think about saying no!
There is a highway and there are tears--
a blurred and furzy Panorama. There is a driveway,
a light on and more tears. There's chicken
and Mahler and candles and beer.
My love is in my arms and still there are tears.
She takes off my clothes: inside my underwear
there's someone else's name. Inside my guts
there's a knife, and it feels like the sky.
Sorghum is a grass, cultivated as grain or forage.
Daphnis and Chloe at Lake Harriet, Minneapolis
It's not the heat; it's the lucidity.
It's not how sultry, the sunset dissipates,
impaled on the masts of sailboats jogging in place.
It's how their hulls are lapped by daylight's last
fuchsia waves over the treetops.
Cough drop, cherry sno-cone, blood on the water.
It's not the sweat-sheen, slick on beerbottleneck,
but the salt, salt tears, spray from a nymph's back,
Ravel on the radio clearing the head,
unclogging the arteries of a heart rusty at rapture.
It's not the rhyme; it's the season--
summer the reason for tongues twined,
poem of moans, chorus of lips on skin, slap
of hipbone on hipbone. So...
how 'bout some badminton?
Anyone up for badminton?
But lovers are lousy at racquet sports.
They launch, dreamily, their cocks,
shrugging the racquet into my hands, amble back
to their sweaty contact sports, while I go fishing
for all those birdies, beachward bobbing.
Little waves lick the sand from my toes.
It's not how Ravel's ballet sets the lovers to dancing;
it's how the bluegills boogie when I play my little
lonely carols (trio for kazoo, mosquito, mourning dove.)
From the benches odd moans emit.
Ankledeep I vibrate to mythic strains. Lightning rod.
Raw nerve. Cricket pizzicato.
Violins swarm my head like bees, like fireworks,
the kind that boom and hiss into glittery waterfalls--
a million popsicles melting down a million chins.
Silver, gold, bauble at the neck of a petty, capricious god.
Oooooh! Pretty, pretty sky.