Karen Brennan / Tributes & Tribulations



For dinner a snack of sausages,  broccoli on the side.  A disagreement on the side
& roses as a first course.  The plant needs watering as the entre & then for dessert a dirty joke
which begins like this a traveling salesman went to a farmhouse which was followed
by a nice sauterne, apples, wedge of blue cheese.  All the guests were delighted.  My carafe
runneth full & blind.  My roses were themselves, repeatedly perfectly








As an afterthought, the backyard held some greenery.  Spectacular chestnuts were placed under
the tongue. The boy, who had ridden his bicycle to the edge of the Sound expressed himself
crudely, but I loved his hands & the grubby knuckles as if a cloud could punch.  I loved
his tearing at the knee and shrieking, a voice caught between oaks.  Like milk rushing into a jar
that formerly held roses,  I was gearing up to recover the trees of my childhood. & the leaves
melted, they tuned out.  As did the landscape’s shadow, the miraculous birds, the soft weeping
inconsolable willow.







We arrive with expectation & leave with hats, not ours.  A whisper along the tracks of floor
boards, creak of galoshes, as in the story where snow falls as a metaphor, covers our heads &
scarves.  Made tender.  Made nervous, as we two squinting up faces.  Cannot see the road as
when, in a careworn instant, a small unidentifiable sound may suddenly strike us as possessing
mystery.
                  In this way, we make a chain linked fence.   Or a mood   Or a tunnel.


CUE:  A Journal of Prose Poetry
Spring / Summer 2005 Issue II, Vol. 2