Kurt Brown

Who Knows Where    

Christmas, 1948, our tree stood preening in a corner, decked out

          like Aunt Rose.

Tinsel shimmered, aping icicles that clutched our eaves, while

          a necklace

of electric lights in various colors bubbled from the boughs.

          Here and there

a frosted figure hung, composed of dough, some house of gingerbread

          or leaping deer.  

Atop the very tip, nearly scraping the ceiling, a toxic cloud of fiberglass

          white as Santa's beard

on which a paper angel rode, her skirt a cone of cardboard gold.

          Below,

a cairn of presents, bound in ribbon or scintillant thread. But the thing

          that caught our eye,

the center of our wonder, was a bulb that gleamed like polished lapis,

          bigger than the rest,

a blue so intense it smoldered, as if it hid a depth, some mysterious distance

          in which all light

was turned back, leaving its core impenetrable, black.  Family legend

          had it some ancestor,

generations back, had blown that ornament himself and brought it

          to these shores.

Passed down, it was unpacked year after year then placed into its box

          again, like the baby

Jesus in his manger, and stowed in the attic. We approached it

          with a mixture

of detachment and awe, gazed into its surface to see ourselves reflected there,

          distorted faces

flattened out and curved, as in a funhouse mirror. But always at its center

          that mystery.

We squinted, gawked, screwed our faces up to read some meaning, some hint

          of where it came from,

but it preserved its equanimity, its rooted calm. No crystal ball, no

          lucid window

to the future, but a blazing opacity—the round, blown, frail enigma of
     the past.

Marston's Field    

Sunlight one Sunday afternoon, and dust
on the bumpy road through Marstson's field
which lay on the banks of the river between
the water and the hump of Indian ridge.
The three of us and Mr. Burrows, ex-GI,
who bore a stitch of scars around his middle
where bullets were machine-gunned
in. But he survived to teach us
how to drive in his converted jeep rollbarred
for the worst, in case we caromed off
through furrows bristling with desiccated corn
or slammed into boles of oaks along the river.
We cranked the clutch and yanked
the shiftstick, then bucked ahead
to swerve across a washboard of exposed roots
until we found a little turnspot at the end,
carved out of sumac, and careened around it,
hooting, terrified but happy, while he bellowed
shift it down, god damn it, shift it down!
We shredded metal, jammed the brakes
and hurtled forward, trying to coordinate our feet,
a little dance of easy-does-it, a little waltz
around a weed-choked road that led
to keep-on-going, pour-it-on-and-don't-look-back.