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The Woods Are On Fire
Fleda Brown
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the woods are on fire
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TED KOOSER CONTEMPORARY POETRY | Editor: Ted Kooser
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the woods are on fire
new and selected poems
fleda brown | Introduction by Ted Kooser
University of Nebraska Press | Lincoln & London
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© 2017 by the Board of Regents of the
University of Nebraska
Acknowledgments for the use of copyrighted
material appear on pages xiii–xv, which
constitute an extension of the copyright page.
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Publication of this volume was made possible
in part by the generous support of the
H. Lee and Carol Gendler Charitable Fund.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Brown, Fleda, 1944– author. |
Kooser, Ted, writer of introduction.
Title: The woods are on fire: new and selected poems /
Fleda Brown; introduction by Ted Kooser.
Description: Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
[2017] | Series: Ted Kooser Contemporary Poetry
Identifiers: lccn 2016034781 (print)
lccn 2016041721 (ebook)
isbn 9780803294943 (softcover: acid-free paper)
isbn 9781496200327 (epub)
isbn 9781496200334 (mobi)
isbn 9781496200341 ( pdf )
Classification: lcc ps3560.a21534 a6 2017 (print) |
lcc ps3560.a21534 (ebook) | ddc 811/.54—dc23
lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016034781
Designed and set in Fournier MT Pro by L. Auten.
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All things, oh priests, are on fire . . . The eye is on fire;
forms are on fire; eye-consciousness is on fire;
impressions received by the eye are on fire.
THE BUDDHA
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contents
Acknowledgments xiii Catching Turtles 18
Introduction by Ted Kooser xvii Fishing with Blood 20
Backfires 1 Apalachee Bay 21
The Scholar’s Cat 22
i. from fishing Saving a Life 24
with blood | 1988
He Says How It Was 25
Garden 5
Emily Dickinson’s Love 29
To Mark, My Retarded
Love, for Instance 30
Brother, Who Lived 20
Years and Learned to Speak from “O’Keeffe ” 31
300 Words 7 She Learns to Walk 31
Arch 9 She Learns to Talk 32
For Grandmother Beth 10
A New Yorker Visits
A Plain Her Exhibition 33
Philosophical Choice 12
She Marries the
Out Back 14 Photographer 34
Canoe 15 An Expert Explains
Whaler 17 Her Work 35
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ii. from do not peel iii. from breathing in,
the birches | 1993 breathing out | 2002
Elvis at the End of History 39 Fourth of July Parade,
Albion, WA 67
Do Not Peel the Birches 41
Buying the King-Sized Bed 69
A Long and Happy Life 43
Cosmic Pitching 71
Learning to Dance 44
Somewhere 72
After the Rain 45
Dogs 74
Loon Cries 47
Highway 5 76
Night Swimming 48
The Poet Laureate Addresses
My Father Takes My
the Delaware Legislature
Retarded Brother Sailing 49
Opening Its First Session
If I Were a Swan 51 after September 11 78
Dock 53 Rumors of Changes
A Few Lines from Circulate on Penguins 80
Rehoboth Beach 54 Cow Falling 82
Mississippi River, near Spring 84
Cape Girardeau, MO 55
Leaving Lewisburg 86
Mother of the Bride Dress 56
Mary Rose Quotes James
St. Paul’s and St. George’s Joyce on the Cliffs at Bray 88
Church, Edinburgh 57
Sunday Morning 90
Farthest North
Chicken Bone 92
Southern Town 58
Hyperspace 94
Burdett Palmer’s Foot 59
Language 96
Kitty Hawk 60
Chat 98
Anhinga 62
For the Inauguration of William
Bombay Hook 63
Jefferson Clinton, 1997 100
viii
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Your Body 102 I Visit the Twenty-Four Hour
Coin-Op Church of Elvis 131
I Write My Mother a Poem 104
Elvis Reads “The Wild
Einstein on Mercer Street 106
Swans at Coole ” 133
from “Graceland” 134
iv. from the women who loved
elvis all their lives | 2004 Elvis’s Bedroom 134
Tillywilly Fog 115 Lisa Marie ’s
Favorite Chair 134
I Escape with My Mother
in the DeSoto 117 The Mirrored Stairwell 135
Elvis Aron and The Meditation Garden 136
Jesse Garon 118
Memphis Discovers Elvis 119 v. from reunion | 2007
Elvis Goes to the Army 120 If Names Started
Shaking Hands with Nixon 121 Coming Loose 141
Sputnik, 1957 122 Biology Lesson 143
Elvis Sings Gospel 123 What It Was Like 144
Industrial Teflon Comes into Use Fayetteville Junior High 145
for Kitchen Pots and Pans 124 Knot Tying Lessons:
Bus Stop 125 The Slipknot 146
The Night before Her Third Makeup Regimen 147
Marriage, She Watches a Mouse 148
Rerun of Elvis’s Comeback
Trillium 149
Performance 127
Small Boys Fishing
Elvis Acts as His
under the Bridge 150
Own Pallbearer 129
Light 152
Mrs. Louise Welling Spots
Elvis at Harding’s Market 130 Ode to the
Buffman Brothers 153
ix
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Wild Lily of the Valley 154 Sugar, Sugar 185
No Heron 155 The Purpose of Poetry 186
Knot Tying Lessons: The Kayak and the
The Perfection Knot 156 Eiffel Tower 189
Knife 157 My Father and
Hemingway Go Fishing 190
Bladder Campion 162
Roofers 192
The Death of Cleone 163
Hare ’s Breath 193
Poem for Our Twelfth
Wedding Anniversary 164 God, God 194
Through Security 165 Dancing at Your Wedding 195
Lady’s Slipper 166 Child Labor 196
Here, in Silence,
vi. from loon cry: Are Eight More 198
selected and new Short History of Music 200
michigan poems | 2010
Big Bang 201
Scavengers 169
Worms 203
Crouching 171
Felled Tree 204
Hawsers 172
Translation 206
Wild Turkeys 173
Building a Cathedral 207
Deer 175
Talk Radio 209
Northern Pike 177
Fourteen Lines 210
Chicory 179
viii. new poems
vii. from no need
of sympathy | 2013 The Swan Flies
Straight at Me 213
Year of the Tent Caterpillars 183
Elegance 214
For, Or, Nor 184
Unfurl 215
x
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The Undoing 217 The Gospel Truth 245
News 218 Speed 246
On a Day That Bombs 219 Blueweed 247
Feeding the Maggots 220 Refrigerator 248
Bees 221 Poem for Record Players 250
Taxol 222 The Sex Life of Anacondas 252
Cancer Support Group The Bar Mitzvah 253
with Painting by Monet 224
Mummy Exhibit 255
Snoring 226
Caterpillars 256
Lesson 228
Getting Free 257
Mute Swan 230
July 20, 1944 258
Tulips 232
Wild 260
The Elk Farm 233
Asian Carp 262
Edward Hopper’s Automat 234
Grateful 263
Silence 235
Protection 264
What Happens 236
Cedar Waxwing 266
Fawn 237
The Poem I Was
Wheel 238 Going to Write 268
The War 239 Reading the
Smithsonian Magazine 270
Pike 240
Surrounded by People 271
Muskrat 241
I Say Your Name 272
Tiny Fish 242
Five Moons 274
Every Day I Touch Things 243
Mushrooms 275
View from Space 244
xi
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acknowledgments
Poems selected from Fishing with Blood and Do Not Peel the Birches are
reprinted by permission of Purdue University Press.
Poems selected from Breathing In, Breathing Out are reprinted by per-
mission of Anhinga Press.
Poems selected The Women Who Loved Elvis All Their Lives © 2004 by
Fleda Brown. Used by the permission of The Permission Company,
Inc., on behalf of Carnegie Mellon University Press, www.cmu.edu
/universitypress.
Poems selected from Loon Cry: New and Selected Michigan Poems are
reprinted by permission of the author.
Poems selected from Reunion © 2007 by the Board of Regents of the
University of Wisconsin System. Reprinted by permission of the Uni-
versity of Wisconsin Press.
Poems selected from No Need of Sympathy © 2013 by Fleda Brown.
Used by the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf
of boa Editions, Ltd., www.boaeditions.org.
The author is grateful to the print and online editors in whose publica-
tions the reprinted poems in this volume originally appeared, sometimes
in different versions with different titles.
xiii
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The selected poems were first published in Alaska Quarterly Review,
American Poetry Review, Ariel, Arts & Letters, Beloit Poetry Journal, Cort-
land Review, Crab Orchard Review, Croton Review, Dunes Review, Georgia
Review, Image, Indiana Review, Iowa Review, Kestrel, Kenning, Kenyon
Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Mid-American Review, Miramar,
New Virginia Review, Ocho, Paterson Review, Poet Lore, Poetry, Poetry
Northwest, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, Southern Humanities Review,
Southern Poetry Review, Southern Review, Tar River Review, West Branch,
and Yarrow.
“Einstein on Mercer Street” was first performed as a piece for orches-
tra and voice by the New Music Ensemble, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,
2002. Composer: Kevin Puts. It is available on the cd titled Against the
Emptiness from New Dynamic Records.
“If I Were a Swan” was set to music by Kevin Puts and premiered by the
Austin, Texas–based chorus Conspirare, under the direction of Craig
Hella Johnson, on September 27, 2012. It is available on cd, performed
by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra.
I would also like to acknowledge The Devil’s Child, the one book not
included in this collection. Its continuous narrative and the tone of the
book made it impossible to fit among these other poems. Nonetheless,
I would like to thank Kathryn Harris and the real Barbara for making
that difficult book possible.
Thanks also to the editors of the following journals in which the new
poems were first published: “5 Moons,” “Edward Hopper’s Automat,”
“Unfurl,” Southern Poetry Review; “Elegance,” “Mute Swan,” New Ohio
Review; “The Muskrat,” Antioch Review; “Lesson,” Bellevue Review;
“Reading the Smithsonian Magazine,” Michigan Quarterly Review; “The
Bar Mitzvah,” “Every Day I Touch Things,” “Tiny Fish,” Image; “Poem
for Record Players,” Crab Orchard Review; “The Sex Life of Anacondas,”
“Snoring,” Georgia Review; “Bees,” If Bees Are Few: A Hive of Bee Poems,
University of Minnesota Press; “July 20, 1944,” Miramar; “On a Day
That Bombs,” “Protection,” New England Review; “Refrigerator,” New
xiv
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Letters; “Asian Carp,” Pleiades; “Taxol,” Numero Cinq; “Cancer Sup-
port Group with Painting by Monet,” “Speed,” Prairie Schooner; “The
War,” Cortland Review; “Getting Free,” “View from Space,” “Pike,”
Southern Review.
My deep gratitude to Ted Kooser, who appreciated my work enough to
invite me to put this volume together. To my faithful pal Sydney Lea,
who’s been reading my poems for decades now. To my Traverse City
poet friends, especially Teresa Scollon, Anne Marie Oomen, Jennifer
Steinorth, and Catherine Turnbull. To my geographically scattered writ-
er friends, especially those at Rainier Writing Workshop. To my family.
And to my beloved husband: first reader and first friend, to whom this
book is dedicated.
xv
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introduction | Ted Kooser
In the opening paragraphs of Walden, Henry David Thoreau writes,
“I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sin-
cere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other
men’s lives; some such account as he would send to his kindred from a
distant land; for if he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant
land to me.”
There ’s an important suggestion behind those words: The author
whom Thoreau seeks and admires makes an offer of his words to someone
else. We might think that a transaction too obvious to point to, but there
is a great deal of poetry written and published today that turns its back
(sometimes with apparent disdain) upon the reader. During the past
one hundred years of the Modern and now Postmodern ages, a great
deal of our poetry has turned away from communication. At a poetry
festival a few years ago, I heard a noted American poet say that it is the
responsibility of readers to educate themselves to a level that they can
understand what poets write. Thoreau would no doubt have scoffed at
such arrogance.
One of my purposes in editing this series is to present the work of
American poets who are doing their best to make gifts to their readers—
to communicate, to charm, to persuade. Jared Carter’s Darkened Rooms
of Summer and Connie Wanek’s Rival Gardens are just such gifts, as is
this third book.
Fleda Brown’s book is indeed the sincere account of a life, though it
is, to use Thoreau’s word, “simple ” only in that it is open-handed and
xvii
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conversational. These are not simple poems by any means, but neither
are they intentionally difficult. They don’t hide anything, nor are they
coy, nor are they clever for the sake of cleverness, but they are indeed a
life, offered to us with candor, care, and generosity, a life like yours and
mine, in which challenges are faced and learned from. Brown’s successive
poems, in book after book, offer us a record of a poet’s development first
as a person and second as an accomplished literary artist.
The first poem here, “Fishing with Blood,” from Brown’s first book,
shows us the poet as a child, curious and observant, attentive to her
parents and the immediate surroundings, and “Mushrooms,” the last
poem of the new poems, shows us the same attentiveness, but now the
poet has grown older, and the protections of her early life have fallen
back and away. You hold the first of these poems in your left hand and
the last in your right, and in between is the carefully and beautifully
presented record of the life of a talented and influential American poet.
And a person who reaches, in welcome, to you.
xviii
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