My Name in Water, Adumbration, Offering, and Depth Perception

Cory Brown

Ithaca College
cbrown@ithaca.edu

My Name in Water

The kids are in the bathtub screaming
and splashing, my wife on the phone
discussing a book on Australian aborigines,
whether we should even bother reading
literature anymore, and you would think
by the way I’m scribbling in the corner
I was trying to write my name in water.
But I can’t even begin a poem let alone
put the rhapsodic, quintessentially-barbaric
yet sumptuous touch on the last line —
you know, the one with such transcendental
finality you would think the bard himself
had risen to scribble out a few last, sad,
desperate lines. Which reminds me of a poem
I heard had been found on the desk
of a college professor killed in a car accident
a few days before the last days of school,
when the forsythia are in full bloom
and tulips no longer purse their lips
for the kiss of spring. The poem is entitled
“Last Instructions to My Students,”
which to me signifies a most profound joke.
I mean, it had been an accident for Christ’s sake!
It’s as if God himself were pointing
to that title and saying, “See! see!
This is what I mean.” Which is to say,
folks, that life is so meaningful you simply
can’t take is seriously. Let me give you
another instance: it is a different day now
and spring is in full bloom; the tulips
on the side of the house have all been picked
by my four-year-old, little purple and
white-striped tulips plucked in the innocence
of youth, and the sun is out now after
a brief storm this morning and there’s
a lull in the day. What I mean to say
is there may come a time, perhaps even today,
when I’ll notice I had forgotten to do something
very important and then realize I had been
squandering my time writing. Then
like in a dream, I will remember the way
my two-year-old’s hair curls up from his
head, and how he’ll sometimes be swinging
in his swing with me pushing him, and off
to the side there will be a puddle
from a brief storm and I’ll look over
and see the perfect reflections it gives
of the now cloudless blue sky, and I’ll stare
into that puddle and not even think about my name.

Adumbration

 

I experienced the annular eclipse today
as an adumbration. As something extraordinary
I wasn’t quite conscious of at the time.
You see, I had forgotten it was coming
and a rainstorm was moving in that hour,
so when it got very dark I sensed that this
was simply one of those eerie moments
when a storm blankets the sky to remind us
of the structure of normalcy. Later,
when I dropped the lawnmower off, Al the repairman,
with his deep, sweet anchorman voice,
shaking hands, and whisky breath,
said he watched it through welding glass
and described the ring as moving around
the moon. How charming, I thought,
and then I imagined the fury of that ring,
its enormity. On my walk, the sun was
shining on the wet, fresh-plowed black soil,
and even the old cornstalks seemed to glow,
pale brown as they were and dirty in their
tired late spring appearance. I was making
my regular ring around the apple orchard
edged now with full-blooming pear
and cherry trees. The tiny blooms themselves
I thought of as rings of fragile tissue
bursting with color. My dog made her run
around me again and again and the sun
continued to pulse its brilliance down
onto the growing alfalfa fields, onto trilliums
in the woods, jack-in-the-pulpits and mayflowers
blooming or preparing to bloom; and down
onto cars and trucks on the highway,
bug-sized from where I was — their little
motors buzzing in the distance, the road
in the bright sun burning around the lake.

Offering

 

What am I doing? Is it enough
to say I know, or don’t
trust you? What’s wrong
with that, that you
would have to be relied
upon to know the question
is rhetorical and serious.
I’m barely alive to you, sometimes
the poems says. And I say
nothing, I can’t help it
(the poem, that is).
That is how I am
keeping it all in hand.
Half in hand and half getting
out of hand is how
to pass it along to you
in your life that I am
offering to myself, for you.

Depth Perception

 

So I was telling Creeley
how I once got a piece of chaff
stuck in my eyelid so each time
I blinked it scratched
my cornea, but I had to keep
the combine going even though
I couldn’t tell with just one eye
how close the header was
to the ground — no depth perception
you know. I’ll never know
how closely he was listening.