Collapse and Borrowed Lighting

Poetry by Bradley Harrison

Poem 3 of 3

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Bradley Harrison is a graduate of the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas in Austin. His work can be found in New American Writing, Forklift Ohio, West Branch, Best New Poets 2012, and elsewhere. His chapbook Diorama of a People, Burning is available from Ricochet Editions (2012). He currently teaches at Truman State University.

It is also probable that “The Pretty Redhead” refers to the poet himself, given Apollinaire’s shrapnel wound to the head. The poet bleeding from the head, when that poet is Apollinaire, is actually quite funny: such an obvious and tired metaphor for the creative act becoming tragically literal. For the man who mastered the art of avoiding cliché in his work (as a god of Innovation) to embody a cliché in his death (at the will of the gods of Order) is such a rich and obvious irony that Apollinaire undoubtedly observed it. And it serves, ultimately, as the perfect embodiment of the underlying “solution” in the poem itself: To settle the quarrel, one must become the pretty redhead, not by self-inflicted wound, but by having been alive and dying.

Shadow stretching triggered the mudslides.

Out of the frame a man stands dissolving.

His delicate roots. Sewing miles at a time.

The wind blurring toward us.

Whispering galleries the invalid dancer.

By flowers, the sound. The first time.

Distorted. Threadbare linens. The infection.

Of futures. How many oceans.

To put out the brushfire. How many songs.

In the snow. Sepia toned. I am.

Opening an untidy mind.

With repentance. The unwoven half.

Going nowhere. The whole.

Of her body, baking in sugar.

I follow the shape of that t-shirt.

Stretched on her, learning her face.

As it rains. Should we be afraid.

In our winding compassion, the province.

Of stitches, to hold the blood home.