CakewalkThe mint’s taken over
and we just watched it,
eating sandwiches, piled
with fresh tomatoes picked
from the garden.
Love is letting a plant take
over a meticulously tended
bed for a child’s whim.
The tomatoes are gone,
and the mint reminds me
that things used to be
full of everything good.
Written 15 February 2020
Brian Fuchs, “Cakewalk” from Scissor-tailed Flycatcher (Scissortail Press, 2020)
Legg-Calvé-Perthes CocoonI’m more reptilian than Russian.
My parts have grown back,
and I’ve shed myself so many times,
expecting somehow to find smaller
versions of myself.
I haven’t grown smaller.
I test my legs often,
waiting for cracks to form
and for the new leg beneath
to emerge, emaciated and pale,
like it was the last time.
I thought I was a butterfly once,
and I fantasized about emerging
beautiful like the people I’m not.
I haven’t emerged beautiful.
Reinvention is either a myth
or a luxury of youth.
I tried so many times,
but I am more like myself now
than I ever was before.
It’s been thirty-five years
since the casts fixed my form
and my legs were allowed
to regrow.
I’m still waiting for it
to happen again,
knowing it won’t,
wishing it would.
I’m not so filled with new versions
as I was before,
and I’ve given up on beauty.
It was alway a lie anyway.
I long to know where
the beautiful people’s cracks form,
and what they expected to become.
Written 7 February 2020 in Payne County, Oklahoma.
Brian Fuchs, “Legg-Calvé-Perthes Cocoon” from Scissor-tailed Flycatcher (Scissortail Press, 2020)
Scissor-tailed FlycatcherOur hands were calloused once,
the birds would flit in fields,
chasing grasshoppers off perches.
Those fields were plowed
by grandfathers,
by their grandfathers,
tilled by their horses,
and planted with our foods
in an Oklahoma freshly wounded
by wars and broken treaties.
We were busy running from
countries that no longer felt like home,
too busy rebuilding our families
to notice how the soil we dug
had been taken from a people
whose lives had become
defined by their deaths,
a people who never had the luxury
to find themselves too busy to care.
Still, the birds respected us then,
in our collective mourning.
They were here before,
in an uninhabited and hostile land.
They were here when we marched
our shame into this place,
when it was easier to pretend that
some people aren’t worthy of respect.
If they knew the truth,
they never showed it.
I wonder if flycatchers tell the tales,
if they gather to hear about the time
before the fenceposts,
when the fields were filled with
butterflies and grasshoppers.
I wonder if they cast us as the villains,
if they can see who we really are.
I wonder when they learned about us,
when they began to see our cruelty.
They are moving northward,
the fields still full of food,
away from the children
of the children of the children,
too many generations to understand
this place or to love the land,
away from the deceptions,
away from the delusions,
away from the cowardice.
I’m waiting for Spring,
and I’m watching the fields
for the dancing grey birds,
while they still visit us here,
and I wonder what we have learned,
and how much we still lie to ourselves.
Written 7 February 2020 in Payne County, Oklahoma.
Brian Fuchs, “Scissor-tailed Flycatcher” from Scissor-tailed Flycatcher (Scissortail Press, 2020)
Making Circles in Darknesson the loss of my mother
Sometimes going through the motions
is enough; it’s almost like living.
Sometimes it’s too much effort
to cross the room for heat,
so I watch the snow fall through
the cracked window,
the layers building up
of snow and blankets
as warmth slips out
through the opening.
I’m drunk on my own grief,
and my hand makes lazy circles
in the air to amuse me.
Life doesn’t mean anything;
it never did.
Sometimes there exists in me
a tempest that cannot be contained.
I rebuild and shift things,
furiously dig through the snow
and in the soil,
looking for a place to deposit
the excess energy
and the memories.
Life clings, meaningless
and important.
One day I will forget to feel the pain,
I’ll laugh without stopping myself
and I’ll let the flowers bloom
without shutting myself away
where I cannot see them.
The lazy circles amuse me;
I’m an infant again,
motherless and cold.
Each day feels different,
experienced in ways
I always feared.
I wonder how I’ll remember joy
when it tries to come back in,
and I wonder if I’ll want it
after the years I’ve spent in darkness.
Life clings, heavy
and beautiful.
Written 7 February 2020 in Payne County, Oklahoma.
Brian Fuchs, “Making Circles in Darkness” from Scissor-tailed Flycatcher (Scissortail Press, 2020)
for Kevin Davis
We could see you were a dolphin
in your dolphin skin,
but we did not understand
what made you laugh,
and what dolphins do.
We found boxes to put you in,
secondhand and raggedy,
boxes you refused to get in.
You were a dolphin!
Dolphins don’t belong
in boxes.
We were duplicitous cephalopods,
our lives murky black clouds of ink.
But you were a dolphin,
and we couldn’t change
ourselves into anything.
You are still swimming,
singing your dolphin songs
and you are still laughing,
while our withered bodies
lose their ink.
So often, we wish
we were dolphins too.
Written 2 February 2020
Brian Fuchs, “Dolphin” from Scissor-tailed Flycatcher (Scissortail Press, 2020)Continue Reading
There were once less vibrant goddesses,
their white glowing forms cloaked
in dust and chunks of rock,
still warm from the kiln.
This was before the invention of hue,
before the creation of color,
when stone shrouds were all the rage
and ice clouds were a favorite accessory.
I was there, unformed and silent,
racing through voids,
watching as dancing turned nothing
into something,
great giants who each took in many
multitudes who will never know
what it is to be born
and reborn,
to be torn apart,
rebuilt,
to exist so briefly
and so infinitely.
Now the colors are vivid,
garish at times.
We are all part of one goddess or another,
limbs and organs,
clouds of debris clinging to their bodies.
Look at my feet;
I’m dancing.
Look at my feet;
I’m dancing.
Look at my feet;
I’m dancing.
Written 5 December 2019 & 27 January 2020 Payne County, Oklahoma
Brian Fuchs, “Stardust” from Scissor-tailed Flycatcher (Scissortail Press, 2020)
In a lot of ways, it feels like things are starting to make sense for me. And it a lot of other ways, it feels like things are as chaotic as always. Everyone seems just a little frustrated, but I’m not sure most of them can articulate why. I know I can’t.
I finished Okie Dokie last month, and I have done a couple of edits to it since. I hope I’m at a point where I can leave it alone now. My copies come in the mail Saturday, and I’ll really know then. I’m both excited and terrified to have my writing available for others. That was always the goal, but I’m just so nervous about these things. I hope others can appreciate my point of view and I’m looking forward to getting feedback, even if that feedback is negative. Constructive criticism is always welcome. I actually just assume that if someone doesn’t like something I’ve written, then that is just a preference they have and does not reflect on my writing in any real way. If the consensus is negative, then I’m just writing the wrong things for current audiences. I will have to wait and see. The really difficult thing will be critiques by those I admire or grammatical errors pointed out by those I don’t.
I’ve started working on my next book, which will be similar to Okie Dokie in that it will contain selections of poetry from the past twenty years, as well as a few new poems to pull the book together. I’ll have one or two more like that before relegating unpublished poetry to a “remnants” book of some sort in the future. I have some things I’ve written that I really love, but I’m not sure how to make them work in any of these projects. I do want a story to emerge from the collection, even if only loosely. Okie Dokie was about myself and about how I see the world around me. The second book will be about family and the places from which they came. The third book is about friendship and love. If I need fourth or fifth, I’ll do another about myself and then a last one about family, as those are the two subjects I’ve written the most about. I’m also not limiting my writing. I have other things I want to write and those things will fall into the projects that make the most sense for them.
For October, I’m enjoying some spooky stories and songs throughout the month, and I am of course bothering family with those things. I miss sharing things with people. I find everyone becoming increasingly isolated, and not just in my own family. I’ll post some of those things on here during the month.