Brenda Hillman
Four Texts
the voice can stop horizontally)
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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.
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