Highway or Belief Read online

  Highway or Belief

  J. Scott Brownlee

  Button Poetry / Exploding Pinecone Press

  Minneapolis, Minnesota

  2014

  Copyright © 2014 by J. Scott Brownlee

  Published by Button Poetry / Exploding Pinecone Press, Minneapolis, MN 55408

  http://buttonpoetry.com

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. If you do choose to share it with your friends, or if you came across this eBook for free, please note that Button Poetry is a small, artist-run organization, and we rely on your support to continue doing this work. Thanks!

  ISBN 978-1-943735-03-7

  Praise for Highway or Belief

  “What I admire most about the poems of Highway or Belief is how they actively choose to leave no one behind; it is evident that Brownlee has devoted much of his craft to name and resurrect the small town casualties that our country would rather ridicule and forget. This is one of the few books that gets the working class right, and it will ring as gospel for anyone who has attempted to outrun the fractured places that will never leave them.”

  —Rachel McKibbens, Final Judge, author of Into the Dark and Emptying Field and Pink Elephant

  “J. Scott Brownlee is a Localist, a poet of place. ‘Texan grammar’ enriches the music of his lines. Syllables sputter, sing. An astonishing attentiveness to the people of Llano bleeds through the page. His poems are communal spaces where ‘po-dunk kids’ and soldiers with ‘a new brokenness’ cast tender and brutal shadows. He’s also a chronicler of beauty and the magical. A blue heron alights in one poem. In another he declares, ‘Inside my catfish body, lures bait / two additional fish.’ Tightly crafted and heart-rich, these poems mark the emergence of a poet with a distinctive and important voice. I eagerly await his first full-length collection.”

  —Eduardo C. Corral, author of Slow Lightning

  for Michael Adams, who believed

  Yusef Komunyakaa, who showed me how to build the highway

  and Llano’s veterans

  Contents

  Letter to the Critic Who Questions, Among Other Things, My Poor Use of Grammar

  The Last Time I Saw Aron Anderson

  English 301

  A Body Loves Dismantling

  River Metaphysics

  Against Allowing Too Much Distance in Place Poetry

  Town & Country

  Riverbank Elegy

  County Lines

  Homecoming

  Elegy for Soldier Who Returned Without a Voice from the War in Iraq

  Bull in the Ring

  Sighting Ourselves at the City Dump Site

  The Gospel According to Addicts in Llano, Texas

  Highway or Belief

  Have You Been Washed in the Blood of the Lamb?

  Backyard Reckoning

  A Conflagration

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Letter to the Critic Who Questions, Among Other Things, My Poor Use of Grammar

  This is my pasture. Ride with me. Let’s tour it.

  I will teach you enough to re-write your thesis if you ask me

  kindly and use Texan grammar—properly requested. Cain’t

  we read the poem in a thick dialect? is a valid question.

  Cain’t we? Cain’t we? Cain’t we?

  (Repetition’s a gift the same way silence is.)

  Please explain to me why you took the train arriving years after

  settlers first pitched their skin-thin pup tents. I want to

  understand your position, though it feels distant now. You

  helped the government Comanche chieftains feared—growing

  fat on home-front, pillar-pocked and tiled, Romanesque

  in its pomp—with its fields collegiate and green, cut

  and well-kept. But most discouraging of all? You forgot

  about me—assumed speaking in my accent meant “un-

  worthy” of New Criticism.

  How can he describe anything as beautifully as Shakespeare

  with his weed-tumbled, Hill Country voice?

  you wondered. And fairly. It’s a thick dialect, after all: full of

  shits, ain’ts, goddamns, and Amens. But the true storm grows

  here, even so, deep in me. The real story begins like a tree inside

  it—tale of this town, I mean—thick mesquite maze of depth

  from which voices come, mist-filled

  like river echoes on a cool morning skipping rocks,

  cut on the wrist blooming red from a barbed catfish

  caught in my youth bleeding out, now, ink-like—

  language dripping from me just as poetry did the first time

  it fell out of the sky, where it rained down freely a week,

  once—between clouds and parched earth, wet and dry

  perspectives—cattle lowing without provocation

  high-pitched, called to congregate there at the center of it

  as if Pentecostal: UFO of its glare and sharp gleam

  and the beam it shot straight down, each night, into lit-up

  pasture—storm-cloud-God-pronounced blue swallowing

  ground it touched in the oncoming arc of its fast approaching

  —many-mouthed void of it from which voices too humble

  to ever have names told me simply,

  Be still for once, poet: quiet.

  Listening itself finally occurred like a rain of great need

  quenching desperation—and then in spite of me. Shit,

  I didn’t have anything to say, critic—no clever gloss,

  no elaborate reading. There was only blue light, then dark.

  The Last Time I Saw Aron Anderson

  He played ball like a king, toking hard on cheap blunts

  in the batting cage. No one could say shit to him

  because he had it grooved to where his swing stayed smooth

  even after contact. The same day they named him Aron

  his parents left. “They forgot the next a,” he said, smiling

  between curves I threw him. “Someday I’m gonna be

  All-State. I’ll make my name famous.” People knew about him

  for five counties at least. Big scouts showed up to watch

  our team play and get whipped by whoever bussed in

  from the city to teach us a lesson—that we were piss-

  poor, po-dunk kids, ultimately: practice for the bourgeois elite.

  But in the district championship, we played a too-wealthy

  Wimberley team we defeated barely. And it was sweet,

  let me tell you, to stand on that field after it with Aron

  saying, “Shit. We did it. We did it.” “Fuckin’ aye,

  man. We did”—because he started slinging meth,

  and even though he got away and the cops couldn’t keep him

  from coming back here, we’ve not spoken since then.

  English 301

  I can’t tell nobody how we is, babe, but want to shout it.

  School ain’t the right place for me. I just sit here and stare

  at the whiteboard or whittle some wood out in shop,

  where I get A-pluses. I can’t write you’re pregnant

  in my English journal because our teacher Miss K’s a Baptist—

  so she wouldn’t like that. I came inside you when you asked,

  used protection each time before that when I could. . .

  when we had it around. Even though you cried “Christ”

  then and “Christ” afterward, it was me you prayed to.

  I understand the word desire now, I think, mostly

  because of you. It’s not something a book could teach me,

&nb
sp; or a show on TV, or a good teacher. . . even Miss K,

  who has helped me read some and explained Romeo

  when I asked her to: why he and Juliet killed themselves

  for no reason. “Aron, the reason was love,” she said.

  “That’s a reason.” While I didn’t get what she meant, then,

  I do now. Like that gravedigger dude in the last play we read

  . . . what was it called?. . . Hamlet. . . I just keep burying

  what I don’t want to reach. It’s a goddamn feeling—desire,

  I believe—one that’s so powerful I just couldn’t help it

  when you said, “Come inside, come inside, come inside.

  Make a baby in me.” But now I don’t know what to do,

  though Shakespeare makes so much more sense to me:

  the scene where everyone dies at the end, what Miss K called

  “the tragic climax, the sad part”. . . next to your seat, empty.

  A Body Loves Dismantling

  & I am not that far away from dis-

  integration. Bluebonnets bloom

  on thick stalks above me. I cannot

  worship them without hesitation—

  the kind my heart strains toward

  as they do nourishment, which is hard

  to find here in my dismemberment.

  I put my skull in a polished bull’s now,

  & his fits perfectly outside like a helmet

  or death-crown made for me by nothing

  & no one. Disappearance sculpts it

  from clay, calls me Adam, Black Boar

  Femur, Bobcat Hip Bone, Coyote Jaw

  Lifted Delicately by Wind. Pockmarked

  for months until flawlessly polished

  by grit churning deep in my gears’

  wisdom teeth, I claim multitudes, yes.

  You have heard correctly. & I get

  a new name with each resurrection.

  Dedicate every carrion kill-cry to me.

  Let my empty tomb turn to a nest

  of catfish: spring-fed, full, forgiving.

  River Metaphysics

  Inside my catfish body, lures

  bait two additional fish—blue &

  washed in wet light through the translucent

  mesh of my skin scale-netted. This trotline

  trinity writes the most crucial poems:

  a catfish, a large-mouth, a perch.

  Are they three dreams inside

  a dream —merely fantastical? No.

  They’re experiential—belief wrapped

  in muscle: metaphysical flesh I answer to

  the way others do God. That’s right:

  a perch inside a large-mouth inside

  a catfish. Belief gets confusing.

  There is the blue river in me & the

  black, wider one I can’t explain. In the night

  sky it hums like an AC unit set to 58

  now. I used to pray directly to it

  on my lawn: eyes shut tight

  by the vice of my sin

  & failure after Baptist meetings.

  It had too much to say, & I couldn’t

  listen—if not from fear then for the freedom

  of the blue future I entered

  I had to leave it

  in the stars above

  me where I knew it belonged— far

  from me, darkening—& continue walking.

  Against Allowing Too Much Distance in Place Poetry

  An elaborate blue heron image

  Still holds weight to me—mostly

  Because I grew up with them

  Nearby, flying. They hatched

  At the river, which is not literary

  Or canonical. Returning home

  From Brooklyn, they teach me

  Silence, too, is complicated. So no:

  I don’t care if you don’t like them

  & have been taught in workshop

  Their very existence is sentimental.

  I want to take this opportunity

  To praise true emotion in poems—

  Which is why I’m repeating

  The reckless statement

  Of my friend from Llano

  Who tried junior college

  Then cooked ice for a living

  Without a trust fund or time

  For aesthetics: My name is Aron

  Anderson. I get too much pussy

  & sometimes over-drink.

  Maybe I’m addicted to the worst

  Parts of me. Put that in your poem.

  Town & Country

  Purchase cheap unleaded here

  at the cloud-white gas tank

  where you meet a no-name

  man without fuel money

  & a story to tell in exchange

  for a lift. “It took two tours

  before I contracted the PTS.

  Can’t get a lick ’a sleep now.

  Got the sense someone’s

  after me—hands on my skin

  like black widows hatching.”

  He pauses, trembling. A red truck

  passes him with a bumper sticker

  boasting We Voted Bush!

  & some tourists in it. “Hey,

  you can’t smoke that near

  these tanks, boss—you’ll

  kill us!” “Hell I will,” he says.

  “Back off. I’ll do as I please.

  You killed me already.”

  Riverbank Elegy

  “What will you burn?” the wind asks me.

  “I will burn everything, of course,”

  I answer it. “And just what do you mean

  by ‘everything’?”

  “Let me tell you again

  to remove doubt fully. I am the arbiter

  of flame. I will burn everything.”

  “Based on what reasoning?” it presses, curious.

  “Think of PTSD after ten years

  at war—the frag-mented Iraq in each soldier

  from here. I will burn everything because nothing

  deserves to be left:

  not the town, tourists passing

  through it—not, even, the river.

  I hope it disappears, soon, drying up.

  May its silt bed be split and our war dead

  revealed nakedly as a wound

  cutting through this county to West Texas

  desert. Let their bodies be seen: palely

  luminescent. Let us confront

  their steel caskets shining—amassed

  like so many lures to catch

  bass and catfish. Will they feed

  five thousand, twenty thousand hungry?

  What sum feels great enough? How

  are we truly to count and believe—radically

  —miracles? I can’t teach you to tell. You want

  to know how far, how deep

  their hurting goes, what it encompasses?

  Walk the bottom of it as they do the river.

  Even now, in the dark, though their song

  sounds broken, I can hear them singing.”

  County Lines

  These lines go out to Carlos Castelan,

  whom I played trumpet with in marching band.

  A mix of white and black, unseemly orange,

  and a sort of cowboy hat the whole band wore,

  our uniforms were on the whole too memorable.

  Carlos was brown, and I was white—

  and I was rich, and he was poor—

  but we cleaned up the same.

  I like to think we both became something

  the other one could not: me a writer

  in New York City and my friend a soldier

  who is still on duty. Picture both of us

  laughing if you can, reaching out

  with our trumpets on the football field

  at night, making music we shared—

  marching Fridays our friends fought

  new battles in Iraq, a country we hadr />
  barely heard of yet. It was

  our senior year. We played our fight

  song, “Happy Days Are Here Again,”

  an ironic tribute to our town’s struggling

  team who lost every game because

  their coach, a college lineman in the past,

  was too conservative to improvise

  new plays. He called weak players

  faggots on the field. In junior high

  he told me, Son, you play like shit,

  and I never forgot. By the time

  he cut Carlos from the team, both of us

  disliked him. The only reason

  we showed up was to march at halftime.

  We held up signs that spelled Cuck

  Foach or just Support the Other Team

  until the cops came and arrested us,

  reading absurd Miranda rights

  with their black tasers pointed

  at the centers of our chests. Our bodies

  muscular and tense with joy,

  we stood up in defiance, then—

  protesting what we both believed

  —the handcuffs on our wrists

  evidence we were brothers.

  Homecoming

  Upon returning no one noticed

  they were back, both inside

  Buttery’s, buying tools they needed:

  a hammer forged in Taiwan

  or Taipei, a sheathed hacksaw

  on sale to cut chain off

  a hitch or the latch on a gate

  that refuses to un-rust

  and grant passageway—nails

  the color of shrapnel still caught

  in one’s lungs—and the other

  untouched, even, by a sandstorm

  the whole time he toured.

  What can never be severed

  extends beyond them—

  a Kevlar rope invisible

  to home-fronters like me,

  though I feel its presence

  in their body carriage,

  which is stiff and relieved

  simultaneously—one man

  remembered for his valor

  and the other one forgotten

  not long after it, though

  their hearts beat in synch

  as if from the same chest

  for a speechless instant.

  Why were we even there?

  the untouched medic asks

  the sniper next to him

  in the paint aisle. Should I