Flowers Which as in a Dream at Sunset I Watered Faithfully Not Knowing How Much I Loved Them

Poetry by Bradley Harrison

Poem 2 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.

after Ginsberg

There are bombs buried deeply in the deserts of Nevada

and that doesn’t bother me much while I sleep. My stomach

is more empty than full and my mouth is a kind of torchlight.

The city stirs smoke glowing undulant from smokestacks

and we are running out of fossil fuels but that is far from me now

and the world is alright. In Dublin tonight it is morning and

a woman is dead in an alley and she has been all night

and a dish washer will find her soon slumped over garbage

and become the first person to touch her in almost

three weeks. Montana is the state I would most like to die in

I hear it’s lovely snow or not. Justin was a friend of mine

in the psychiatric hospital we shared a room and even though

I woke up once to him staring at me from his bed he was

a decent man with an ugly tattoo that he loved so dearly

more than anything especially himself though he tried.

There are children without sheets in this very city and

the world is alright. I drove to a peacock farm and spent

almost an hour wandering and watching them sort of blossom.

One of them flew into a tree on a branch much higher than I thought

he could reach and he sat there defiantly staring back at me

as if to say what do you care and I didn’t have an answer

and I never do. My baby Echo was hit by a car and I miss her terribly.

These things happen all the time there is this woman named

Dolores I know from the shelter who used to work as a stripper

where her name was Trinity and she has a very nuanced

theology wherein the Lord is a janitor and the world

is just fine. It can save itself she said and though I don’t

believe in much really I believed her when she said it

although in retrospect I would have believed about

anything she said because to me she is beautiful

and that is my theology. A bride on her way to the altar

and her veil is filled with bees and her breasts are leaking

honey and she is never stung she just closes her eyes.

The prison guard sleeps in the pipes of black coffee

and salt spills itself along underground veins and sadness

is a way of singing to oneself I am trying to show you.