D e a d P a p e r

Poems

VAN K. BROCK’s most recent publications include his essay “A Poetics of an Outsider,” with five poems in Southern Quarterly (Fall, 2007). Two poems from his Unspeakable Strangers (Anhinga Press, 1996), “The Hindenburg” and “This Way to the Gas,” are in Charles Fishman’s Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust (2007 edition). Among his other collections are The Hard Essential Landscape (University Press of Florida, 1979) and Lightered: New and Selected Poems (Anhinga Press, 2005). He is the founder of Anhinga Press, which, after his departure, re-named its annual poetry prize, the Van K. Brock Florida Poetry Series.

VAN K. BROCK

Morning, 2007

Morning came to me and I did not know her name,
for she was bloodred, not white, as I had been told,
and she was wrinkled, pocked, and naked.

I saw the seas were sweat pulsed from agony,
and the sweet springs feeding the lakes
and rivers were her tear ducts.

Her mouth gashed her face, her eyes were sores. No,
I did not dance to see my pain, my life, only a pustule
on her serene face, with its gash peacefully smiling,

though between her breasts and flaps of her womb,
convulsions spaced the diastolic rumblings of wars,
the systolic jerking of her head and all extremities.

The pale night came like a savior as the sun vanished,
promising death, as stars blazed from luminous sores
with the waves monstrous parodies muffled hymns.

VAN K. BROCK

The Woman in the Labyrinth

She moves in broken circles,
like a dancer, right leg a wink shorter
than her left.
................... And her words go on
in a slight gait that never stops,
singing her way down the road.

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