Alan Britt (2 poems)
A SUDDEN POEM ABOUT IRONS
Irons, scalded over coals,
irons balanced over many flames
that existed as swarming thoughts,
irons in unassuming pastel garb.
Irons, with dark ink bleeding through
the onionskin paper of existence,
the thin membrane shielding us
from constant death.
Irons, singing our mortal attempts
to appease the universe,
universe with symbolic doilies twisting
from the strings of hopeless violins,
twisting from umbilical cords of cats
easing their grey and white foreheads
beneath our chins plus knuckles
that tend the Weber grill wafting chicken,
salmon and ribeye smoke
through the lusty branches
of a yellow Norway maple.
Well, these irons resemble the skeletons
of neglected pets: iguanas, potbellied pigs,
and pit bulls, plus a feral population
of Maryland domestic shorthaired cats.
Irons, because I no longer recognize
the sentimental code for existence
(see Baudelaire), after Chuck envisioned
a code better than most folk’s depraved
vision of reality.
Irons are the wrought that thumps us
without a sound to the bottom
of the infinite,
a la Jiménez.
Irons twinkling like ballasts,
like drunken solar systems
above sacred mass,
above rehearsal for band neon tangos
to camouflage deceitful angels
who sometimes lure us to the promised
land and other times
panic the entire flock
dazing peacefully
in the exhausted branches of amnesia.
TEMPORARY AMNESIA
I stand beside a furnace,
a wrought-iron, roaring furnace.
I would be about three years old
and sleepwalking through a quasi-strange house.
The flames of the furnace blasting blue oboes.
Actually, I’m a smidge less than three years old
and the furnace a 50-year-old WWI
fully-functioning antique.
Anyway, I stand beside that furnace
while strangers in the house, from every direction,
flow in flannel robes across a chilly Indiana linoleum floor,
brushing aside thick darkness to rescue me.
Somehow this furnace, blazing when I was between two
and three years old, awakened recently, quite unexpectedly,
in a basement apartment just outside Baltimore with its
single blue oboe tongue like a pilot light engorged
by the frost covering my temporary amnesia.
Alan Britt has been nominated for the 2021 International Janus Pannonius Prize awarded by the Hungarian Centre of PEN International for excellence in poetry from any part of the world. Previous nominated recipients include Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Charles Bernstein and Yves Bonnefoy. Alan served as judge for the 2018 The Bitter Oleander Press Library of Poetry Book Award and was interviewed at The Library of Congress for The Poet and the Poem. He has published 18 books of poetry and served as Art Agent for the late great Ultra Violet while often reading poetry at her Chelsea, New York studio. A graduate of the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University he currently teaches English/Creative Writing at Towson University.