Untitled by John Gregory Brown
Ibex
In 2000 AD, when she fell—the fir tree,
not the ibex—it was the first death.
A lightning strike, plus age, plus drought.
Falling trees never die alone; there’s always
an extinguishing in the crush: birds, insects, rodents.
This day it was Celia, the last Pyrenean ibex
who met her end beneath the fallen fir.
A year earlier, in a contemporary act
of sympathetic magic, erstwhile biologists
swirled not ochre-tipped sticks, but ibex-sized
Q-tips in the whorls of Celia’s ears, preserving
her image in perpetuity through DNA.
Upon news of Celia’s demise, fifty-seven
of her distant relations were implanted
with Celia-cell-filled eggs; just one bore
Celia anew. For ten long minutes she lived
again, gasping the old air with new lungs.
It must have been too much, being born twice.
Dying, twice. All the loneliness of being the last.
Scientists are hopeful, though: in this time of dying
there’s no limit to what the dead can do.
Stardust
Reshelving one book, I found another I’d been seeking,
one I’d thought lost, or lent. A book full
of poems about black holes, the big bang,
and other reckless phenomena of the universe.
Lately, I’ve been moving and removing things:
editing photos, ditching drafts. Unsubscribing.
There’s no pattern to it. A recent work by the poet
of the black holes popped up online; she had been
“living with a diagnosis of ALS.” I’d just deleted
an email about ALS drug therapies. No mystery
there: coincidences just stack up like coins,
noticeable only when they grow tall.
Sometimes this universe feels small.
Other days I am overwhelmed by the vast.
My father, who died of ALS, is floating
out there, atomized particles of dust and fragments
of memory. No pearled gates, just black holes
and stars that are already dead by the time their light
reaches me. But this evening I hear birdsong coming
from the maple just outside my window. A wood thrush.
It’s simply birdsong, and there is no message in it
for me, yet listening, my heart bursts open
like a star. I search the branches for the bird.
Dysphagia
Dreams tell the story with blunt metaphor: A scarf
too tight around the neck. A house of coiling
hallways and rooms without windows. Underwater,
the body entangled in seaweed, far from the surface.
A priest’s hand entering the mouth, cementing
host to palate, an ecstasy of choking
Blue
Don’t talk of orange sunset or rosy-fingered dawn.
Instead, speak of this blue time, this twilight.
Or the clouded morning—the way blue spreads far
behind the trees, conjures from absence, from white,
arises through the simple refraction of light.
Or how blue vanishes up close:
the color of seawater evaporates
in my hand. A blue jay feather,
spread, turns into a hundred browns.
Tell me how to gather this impossible color—
this blue river, blue sea, blue sky, blue world—
and keep it. My blue, evanescent love.
Tell me how not to lose it.
About the author:
Adrienne Pilon is an essayist, poet, and educator. Recent work appears in Tendon Magazine, Solstice, The Palisades Review, and elsewhere. She has served as editorial staff on small literary magazines, and is currently a poetry reader at Kitchen Table Quarterly. She lives in North Carolina and sometimes California.
In the artist’s words:
Born and raised in New Orleans, John Gregory Brown is the author of the novels Decorations in a Ruined Cemetery; The Wrecked, Blessed Body of Shelton Lafleur; Audubon’s Watch; and A Thousand Miles from Nowhere. His honors include a Lyndhurst Prize, the Lillian Smith Award, the John Steinbeck Award, a Howard Foundation fellowship, the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Book of the Year Award, and the Library of Virginia Book Award.
His visual art has been displayed in individual and group exhibitions and has appeared online and in print in Hayden’s Ferry Review, the New England Review, Flock, The Brooklyn Review, Gulf Stream, and elsewhere.
He is the Julia Jackson Nichols Professor of English at Sweet Briar College in Virginia, where he lives with his wife, the novelist Carrie Brown.