"Debris" by William Brewer

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend June 16, 2017   Debris   William Brewer

Storms are generous.                                                                  Something so easy to surrender to,                                                                         sitting by the window, and then you step out into the garden you were so bored of,                 so bored of you hated it,                                                but now it needs you.                                   Twang of the rake's metal tines biting at the dirt. You destroy a little camp of mushrooms,                                                                               pull leaves into a pile,                                                                                         are struck with wonder                                                                                when there rolls out                                                                                                a little bird's nest—                                                                                                           the garden's brain.                                          You want to hide in it.                                                                        Twigs, mud, spit, and woven in: a magenta strip of Mylar balloon that glints when turned to the sun,                                                                     a sway of color you've seen before.                                        You were a boy.                      You told your grandfather you spotted a snake in the yard                               between the buckeyes. He revved his weed whacker,                                                   walked over,                  conjured a rose mist from the grass                               that swelled in the breeze, swirled together, grew dark,                                                                               shifting through fans of sun,                                                                                            magenta, then plum, blush,                                                                                                                                     gone.   Smell of exhaust. Tannins of iced tea                                                you drank together on the porch later,                                                                               his spiked with Wild Turkey,                                                 the tumbler resting on  his thigh,                           the ice-sweat running off, smearing the dried snake juice,                                                                         pooling in a divot of scar tissue.                    A souvenir, he called it, from the winter spent sleeping in a hole in the ground in a Belgian              wood,                                                    listening for German voices to start singing                                                                                   so he knew he could sleep.            Copyright © 2017 William Brewer. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   "I spent much of my early life with my grandfather, a World War II veteran. While he rarely spoke about his experience, I could still sense, even at a young age, how it hung around him like a kind of shadow presence. This poem originates from a memory when I acutely understood how his time fighting in Europe altered his actions and his body." —William Brewer   William Brewer is the author of I Know Your Kind, forthcoming in September 2017 from Milkweed Editions. He is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and lives in Oakland, California. Poetry by Brewer   I Know Your Kind (Milkweed Editions, 2017) "San Sepolcro" by Jorie Graham "Landscape with a Blur of Conquerors" by Richard Siken "The Driver of the Car Is Unconscious" by Timothy Donnelly Help Support Poem-a-Day   If you value Poem-a-Day, please consider a monthly donation or one-time gift to help make it possible. Poem-a-Day is the only digital series publishing new, previously unpublished work by today's poets each weekday morning. The free series, which also features a curated selection of classic poems on weekends, reaches 450,000+ readers daily. Thank you! Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038