Category: Deborah Brown

by Deborah Brown

Like that mouse

who clung to the cabin wall

by its pale, delicate nails,

its shapely knuckles curved tight,

and then its tail flicking

side to side like a tongue over

its plump thumb of a body,

as if joining the argument,

clawing its way up, swaying

until, in the morning, the soft

collapsed body of the mouse,

stuck half in, half out of the wall,

as though he’d heard beckoning

noises from the field, as though

he’d tried to drive straight through

and batter his small way there.

from Walking the Dog’s ShadowFind it in the library

Copyright © BOA Editions, Ltd 2011
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc.
on behalf of BOA Editions LTD.

by Deborah Brown

        I say nothing

about how fast the light travels

   or of Einstein’s problem catching up with it,

     or of Ludwig Boltzmann, who killed himself

when scientists mocked his belief

   in other dimensions. Today

     the strings of Boltzmann’s theory

have stories to tell, they

   pulsate to anyone’s rhythm.

     I hold you in ten dimensions,

wish you safe in all of them.

   I know space and time curl around strings

     that give rise to the gravity

which holds us here, the way the notes

   of Mozart’s Requiem scrolled

     on his last staves. The invisible strings

in us spin themselves into specks of light,

   and two new forces one strong and one weak,

     draw us together. This is the complicated

shape of our time together, our past and present

   woven into a fragment of the sky.

     It is an elegy to you.

from Walking the Dog’s ShadowFind it in the library

Copyright © BOA Editions, Ltd 2011
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc.
on behalf of BOA Editions LTD.

by Deborah Brown

You can start anywhere,

you can start with the hummingbird

that quivers at the feeder, or with a moon

lost in the corner, or the stray dog who creeps

to my window and breathes. But not with

the Lebanese woman on TV who sobs as she

trudges back to her house of rubble.

How can I tell you my small sorrows?

In Slovenia, at the Nazi prison in Begunje,

you can see the last writing of two British

soldiers. On the stone of a shared cell, each

scraped the facts he pared himself down to:

name, address, parents, schools, date of enlistment,

rank, battalion, date and place taken prisoner, and

the date which became the year of death.

I didn’t want to start there.

I don’t want to end there. But no matter where I start,

or end, I will tell you—that if I could

touch you, I would become a hummingbird, a hidden,

shining center. And the dog—she would

press her small, strong back into my hip.

from Walking the Dog’s ShadowFind it in the library

Copyright © BOA Editions, Ltd 2011
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc.
on behalf of BOA Editions LTD.