Sample Poems by Philip Brady
Rhyme
Unseeable, unsayable, being dead.
But shadow-blooming iris, lip blooded--
I see and say. A child, I hummed
and rocked and hummed to dilate time.
Unplumbed, my tongue; but palpable
the pulse of subterranean ventricles
from Queens to Tokyo--turnstiles
ticking by the billions as deep as
Cocytus, where all suns clot.
What's mute, can names dilate?
The salt unseeable, where does it steep?
A key twitches my shadow, trickles blood.
An iris suddenly clots, the blooded word.
Unsayable, all future days unseeable
as unbloomed suns, even tomorrow blind.
My bones steep. Will we wake in time?
Does fear of not returning shadow rhyme?
Unseeable, seeable, rain unsalting seas,
and steeping in my saline blood a key
to Queens or Cocytus. Sayable,
mute death, the day all ventricles
dilate in time. A child, I could pretend
I saw echoes. Time and darkness bend.
Virginity
The night my flatmate came into the world
I heard him through the wall. My ear
throbbed, crushed to the gummy wallpaper
violets and magnolias which purled
into wire-eaten plaster and emerged
alive, beyond, set in a girl's hair.
The world. I wanted it. I stroked the air,
mouthed words into a sensuous mirage
that haunted pimple-scarring years
until I pecked through the supple
sylvan barrier myself but
felt the same--still sealed in skin. The world
had been on my side of the wall
and it was this had made my friend cry out.
Carmel
Why do we turn away from
the eternal?
Robinson Jeffers asked. The Pacific surf,
crashing against the inscape of his skull,
washed off brine and starfish, and left,
turn from the eternal. Frail vowels
spiral into a cerulean sky
so vast it seems almost believable
there is no other we. No turning away.
I am in thrall to an inhuman voice
chanting the mantra beyond silence:
turn eternal. Drown your secret loss.
Let every moment achieve utterance.
Even the stones of Tor House mark the seconds
between the rasping slant rhymes of the ocean.