Brent House

selected poems

brent house

Augur of
Apogee & Perigee

A son’s snare falls on the moon in perigee
loud enough to startle an impœnitent sinner                         from resolute woods

I draw heads & again after hearts of pure proof nestled in glass as prayers
in thickets of tall grass                                                                            as drops on a stolon

as sounds of a membrane stretched across a hollow hemisphere
struck w/ repulsion     loud enough to silence     sounds of ennui & anomie

so I hear the full timbre of a mother’s child      near & lifted
as smoke rises      w/ a tincture of darkness want & lack      he fords
                                                                                                                                            faith & doubt
                                                                                                                               creeds of certainty.

I sumpter between father & son      a man of memory & a boy of flesh
& I fail both      when a son’s line carries a resonance of light in apogee
                                                                                                                                      as waters thirst
                                                                                                                                            a prohibition

round my track is a coiled wire tight against bright sounds of those battered                                                              by mallets      under a canopy                                                      of hickory      oak & pine.

Here      I gain warmth from newmade waters of life
where my daddy just let me go      to still                                                                       & sit

to watch & learn while he raised his monuments
& stroked fire w/ flams & taps & drags                                      w/ a craftsman’s pride

he distilled night in the quiet voice of itinerant preachers
& stroked his stubble as a scholar                                                      under a warm tallit.

I listened as one subject to law
as a dark waned stone reflected poor light back                     to a shallow watchet

clear as a creed recited & yet not held by precious scars
by flows of amber                                                                                     broken by the gauger

while I remain young & raw
primitive as sacred rituals                                                     & a moon of unbegun shine.

brent house

excerpts from Augur of Remnants

1.

Those people I would ask about the past
     pass

as our heartwood houses level to foundations
     & our planed table & hand-lathed bed—sold.

I stare past the screen at dusk & mosquitoes
     draw to the forshape of my breath.

I just can’t see how we’re better off.

Those people—seers—of the fallen straw
     & spilled cornmeal

tossed embers & termites
     divined from darkness      & its remnants.

Wakened by a thunderstorm
     strong as flights of chords to a false moon

I lay in the pole-lofted voices of migrants
     as a string of prophecies

swarm w/ ecstasy & clairvoyance
     & flights of diurnal loss.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          In ruderal light our hill country purified                                                                                                                                                         the sound of lonesomeness

from high-born & benevolent brothers—
     the sound of wholesomeness

perhaps? My newborn son
     this legend ends      before you are born.

3.

Our fathers sawyers of longleafs cut by old moons
     our fathers      their coat cuffs hemmed w/ hide leather

our fathers      birthed as paternal orphans worked can to cain’t.

They bore a shotgun      a lastborn son & fled a burning house. So
     our fathers—come as deity & walk yearlong in forest & fields.

Fill troughs w/ sunturned faith      & plant w/ your eyes to stars
     bode our salvation w/ broken vessels & fragile organs

holy as acetate records—I’m not coming home.
      Any more. In cold shadows

the lonesome tears of a teetotal man & scales of breath

sound in atria & ventricle as a nightjar’s diastolic pulse & backflow
     a midnight train’s high whistle opens to a sorrow’s pass.

Son—as the overwritten sky of morning
     lights up—I wonder.

5.

My newborn son—so aimless I wandered from hymns & gospel revivals
     & I heard an altar call.

I saw fireflies at the treeline—on the first day of summer! I saw the light!
     They ain’t all gone—

though our pinewoods hewn to root      branches cut & bole stripped
     & silence on our land.

Son—you grown so strong      all these years after a brokenhearted birth
     & I ain’t surprised—

newborn      & drawn from broad-boned & thick-blooded stock & still
     mine—

the hand-shared time      & note-shaped harmonies of sacred & primitive
     truth. I could cry

as a whippoorwill on summer nights      who shoves the nestling aside
     head over heels

for apartness & wastrel days
     & blue-hearted songs from a church about a mile away. I rhapsodize

about a father & a country I near forgot—      & resurrection.

7.

My son—our fathers.      They lifted the ruins of a revival      near the alcorns
     & the stately oak

& laid footings of brick deep into alluviums left before the floods of thirteen
     pent

by a constant levee—a vague relief against the humid tiers of our covenant
                                                                                                             broken on this gloamskin.

9.

How deep our loess thickest near the rivers & thinner away.      Moreover—
     a wry man presides over elemental laws of sound & sings the most gravid
pines beautifully      exquisite & predictable as the strike of a timber rattler.

yes—w/ sublime succinctness! A linear body crosses a distance to a source.
     Sounds      as particles      pillars & letters.

His breath an unpredictable vortex or eddy of flowing water. We believed.
     yet, always      just      unencumbered wind.

So      in a current of blue-boned pain.      & lying in a wilderness.
Minden of the fire & he could be consumed in sorrow.      His succession

through the cast.      O—hayride & jamboree!      His roots in a cradle of stars
     his reveled past.      & revered Jehovah! My son—we are born anew!

Rejoice      on the tonewoods      & bridges & also our frets.
     In unison—our blood sings past                                                 to the dolor of hills.

brent house

Augur of Migration

While I sleep on picked feathers & bedtick   entire countrysides imagine
                                                                nearness to narrow precepts of cords
woven in rows   & pulled tight—still enough to allow the mnemon
                                                                                 of further sins to encode—
as distant cattle bow heads in prayer & save us from nights of sleeplessness.
                                                                       Spots of absent orgone intercede
vitally as impulses of water pour on the crown of an errant newborn
                                                        & erratic flights of broad-chested martins
to the bottle gourds hold the red-tailed hawks from their chicken prey.
 
So a pluck of fear gathers the sarcomere & further   the heart muscle
laces chambers of these hollows   where I rest in the house of our father.
                                                                                                     In other words:
brothers & sisters   after all those years we sat in church pews
                                                                                                     we knew better
sermon & hymns   we sang as a ledge-perched martin   in a horizontal pose
                                                                                                     & nape feathers
lifted   w/ flicks of wings & tail   & snaps of its bill   & need-be locked claws
                                                                                                                in midair
to defend against rival starlings   w/ a high-pitched hee hee call.
 
I saw   y’all wrested body & blood   from the hands of your neighbor
                                                                                                     the beloved son
his momma shut-in just down the road  & y’all cousins in our congregation
                                                                                 scatter on a straight course
& don’t know how an oblate martin finds its way   back to the colony
                        by local landmarks   magnetic field   or compass navigation.
We don’t know how to pray as we ought   on thrashed rye   or bedstead
lathed by his chisel & treadle   & covered by her lonely star quilt
                                                                      & full-throated songs of survival.
 
While a girl who sleeps under a new quilt will dream of the boy 
                                                                                       she’ll marry fancy embroidered
squares will wrap him with backstitches   close & delicate as vessels
against a membrane                                                                   inside a shell & nest
the martin breaks its hatch   & fledges over river shoals in hunger
                                                                                       & doctrinal flights—a migration
of progeny into these lengths of light   & a return to warring days.
 
brent house

Augur of Real Wilderness

The cone opens / to release its seed & a thin laminate gathers

as wilderness rests      beyond / as sons born from guilt
                                                                                                                 from a same profligate land
                                                                                                                  our richest & blackest mold

brother      well known      your ruinous      flow of blood won’t even harden pine
& you mourn / when I could come home

your elegiac voice. The real wilderness
rambled as atheroma      second growth      & helical seed … as scarce
                                                                                      as commensals of our gopher tortoises
                                                                                     city-bred brothers settle on these roots

& hornswoggle.

Brother      list to the three stands:      timber is a forest / not a wilderness
                                                                            timber      the lastborn hold of a rotten sword
                                                                              timber      shrunken remnant of a green cord

for land      remains      & logs … do not necessarily mean progress.

I have counted seed—one hundred and eighty-three—dropped
from the cone                                                                                            & a flood of abundance

turns to rapids / & loss      loss & lost to after-years. Your peaveys & pike
                                                                                                                                                           poles roll

behind the rocks & shoals      until a big run opens the sheer boom
                                                                                                                                       & your labor floats

                                                                                                                                                               down &
                                                                                                                                                        disappears
                                                                                                                                            past a riverbend.

Even as you pile a good lot of wood on sticks      & dry boards.      Brother
                                                                                                                                          you own this mill

but you walk on a surface horizon lost to clay / & a summer rain &
                                                                                                                                                                      land
                                                                                                                                                   made barren
                                                                                                                                        from scarification.

Brother      the whole face of our state is such a scene of desolation
                                                                                                                                 & so few acres of pine

& so many acres not fit for cultivation      so / brother: timber is a plantation
                                                                                                                                            not a wilderness.

Brent House is the author of The Wingtip Prophecy (April Gloaming, 2023) and a contributing editor for The Tusculum Review. His poems have appeared in journals such as Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Third Coast, and Kenyon Review.