N.D.Williams’ Books

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