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Brenda Hillman


Four Texts


the voice can stop horizontally)

_____________________________________


                                 Two Brothers


I have doubted my belief in sentences because of their
             refusal to recall certain things.

A way of being satisfied. A sound.

So the wish to restore them “arose”—

Walking with two brothers down Copacabana in the fifties
            city of gold teeth açúcar  such nerves,

a developing time sandwich holding hands on the black and
             white sidewalk, wavy like the graph of a patient who
             has not been born yet,—
 
our six feet shuffling through childhood my brothers’ sea babble
            delicious remedy keeping me mixed with them;

Love comes from nothing but it comes.

Maybe it’s not that day but near it; a loose agitated brightness
            That needs rescuing . . .

The spirits will work anywhere: past the vanilla courtyards’
             foam, sound flies, shells of grub cravings;

each word makes an outline come out of a body.

“To think” means: the looseness is taken away.  


Two Brothers, from Loose Sugar, 1997



Carmerstrasse



            ON CARMERSTRASSE


            Beneath balustrades selected against
            your going, a breezened
            day anticipates a hope;
            then the walk into
            each word is infinite
            and navigates the stumble.
            under the porticoes at
            childhood’s edge where half-said
            sentences assemble in bombed
            or not bombed corners
            you, hurrying back to
            the poem near a
            compound diplomat’s swanlet canal’s
            day from a bottle
            where bears hold hands:
            whether or not you
            do the work involves
            negotiating with the drama
            of class shadow.  Now
            a trance has been
            cast over the world,
            but which? From a
            chained bench, the soul
            turns to its example.


                for Joachim Sartorius
                from Pieces of Air in the Epic (Wesleyan, 2005)



Carmerstrasse, from Pieces of the Air in the Epic, 2005















http://galileo.stmarys-ca.edu/bhillman/

Brenda Hillman is an American poet, born in Tucson, Arizona. She has published seven collections of poetry: White Dress (1985), Fortress (1989), Death Tractates (1992), Bright Existence (1993), Loose Sugar (1997), Cascadia (2001) and her latest collection is Pieces of Air in the Epic (2005), with Wesleyan University Press. Hillman has also written three chapbooks: Coffee, 3 A.M. (Penumbra Press, 1982 ), Autumn Sojourn (Em Press, 1995), and The Firecage (a+bend press, 2000). For Shambhala Publications, she edited Emily Dickinson's poetry, and, with Patricia Dienstfrey, co-edited The Grand Permisson: New Writings on Poetics and Motherhood (2003). Hillman serves on the faculty of Saint Mary's College in Moraga, California, and is involved in anti-war activism with CodePink. A recipient of numerous awards, Hillman has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, among others. Brenda Hillman lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.