Michael Brennan
Michael Brennan Poems
The world was already the world
and we were looking for ourselves.
Like something mispronounced
we kept repeating our names,
...
The old man fumbles with his keys,
The waiter appears embarrassed.
‘I don’t want to talk about love any more,
...
Stained glass on a winter’s day. I read your diary backwards.
Tea hot in the cup, the sugarbowl empty and, yes, rain beginning to fall outside.
...
Don’t worry too much, it’s all taken care of.
That’s what the city tells you. You’re goo-goo about it,
fresh off the boat, looking to be the grit in its dozen oysters
...
It’s true the mirror was in love, finding itself in every face.
It was not a function of syntax. His life was slurred.
Yes, it’s true, the heart hid in the dark with the dream of light.
...
It was days later. Not long after we left the convent
and the war stopped. I promised to take her
directly to the train station, but the sight of her
on the backseat scrambling out of that uniform,
...
I should tell you, it’s nothing like home.
Not one of them thinks of me as a stranger,
but they politely welcome me to their houses,
and feed me delicious feasts.
...
Nipples hard as bullets, that’s how her way
With words put it. There wasn’t much
Left to say after that, with the ferry leaving
At four. Given good traffic, I’d be home
...
PRESSED BETWEEN two atmospheres, fatigue swelling in your eyes you rise up and face day, the intrigue of chance cast in the air, a face you assume, a name of so many syllables, so much history. Erstatz-coffee drawn from
...
I had drifted out far beyond
ill-reputed water metaphors
tipped off by a cunning editor.
Careful not to turn oceans to sand,
...
We were always mucking about
with the unmentionables,
trudging through the snow.
Winter closing around the heat
...
When we get back from here,
tell me how it was,
the stretches of land we crossed,
the friends we made.
...
These are strange lands I barely understand. We are walking in a park of manicured lawns.
The sky is a mosaic of syllables
Parts of a puzzle.
...
On a street in Tenerife she finds a photo
A pigtailed girl she places on her index finger’s
Soft pad and balances there each day of her life.
...
Michael Brennan Biography
Michael Brennan, born in Sydney in 1973, is an Australian poet based in Tokyo. His first volume of poetry, The Imageless World, won the Mary Gilmore Award. According to critic David McCooey, together with Unanimous Night it forms "the first parts of a triptych", and both books exhibit a "...complex and stylish interplay between opposing categories: light and dark; presence and absence; prose and poetry..." McCooey notes that "[t]he poetry is both brilliantly imagistic and pared back, both worldly and almost mystical in its concerns. In both books we find similar interests and motifs: hunger, darkness, eroticism, the earth and the sky..." Brennan is the director of Vagabond Press, and the Australian editor of Poetry International Web. He is also an academic, and his doctoral thesis was entitled "The Impossible Gaze: Robert Adamson and the work of negativity.")
The Best Poem Of Michael Brennan
Revelation
The world was already the world
and we were looking for ourselves.
Like something mispronounced
we kept repeating our names,
each syllable a slice of concrete
we tied to our feet for security.
In those days, there were stories,
an uncle ascending into cirrus,
an aunt who never surfaced again,
we dreamt of the long narrow road,
the precision of a snowflake falling,
the wrong turn that always got us there.
In the end we went out beyond the scrub,
to the free-to-air stations, thinking about
sophisticated things, branch stacking
and pork-barreling, the light in her smile
or the time in the middle of an interview
she reached out and touched his hand.
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