September Poems
THREE POEMS by BRIAN CHAN
Transcendence
The useless matters: the invisible
waiting to be seen by eyes made again
naked as a newborn’s: a bridge across
an open space that needs to remain
open:a domain without a border
Black Coffee In A White Café
In this bright day full
of emptiness, all words fall
like screaming birds shot
by hungerless men.
Through that rain of corpses,
I see you at the open door about
to cross the rug bridging
your dream and mine. Two dreams
are always crossing and some-
times their authors know how not to let
the chance of a third, even
as it appears, fade. But white
fences are no less effective
for being almost erased by the sun,
for the more children play behind
them, the tighter their
gates stay shut.
To Be
still at one point of day,
waiting for a never-before thunder again
to throb through the vein, not habit
but masked hunt, the slack tension of a tiger perched
in a tree of pacing nodding
monkeys and macaws, disinterested but total
in his commitment to these limbs,
beyond any question of fall or other word,
not even waiting but knowing
that already across the stretched scroll of air is
drawn the arc of impulse that will
be stamped into fading rainbow when a certain
flake of iron obeys the pull
of the magnet of focus and springs so in full
surrender to one more exchange
between the flaming tongues of old blood and new breath
Brian Chan was born in Guyana and lives now in Alberta, Canada. These poems are from his new collection Gift of Screws to be published by Peepal Tree Press, England, November 2005.
Copyright 2005 © by Brian Chan
