Well, it's been a little while. I'm still here, but a few things have changed.
For one thing, the logo above is different. The microphone is gone. So is the podcast. It didn't seem to make sense to have a mic in the logo if there's nothing to which you can listen.
I scrapped the podcast. The gap between the number of people who listened to it and the amount of time it took to make was too vast to justify. Plus, I didn't enjoy making a podcast. Doing so wasn't a labor of love. It was just labor. Throw in working a full-time job and planning my wedding, and it didn't make sense to keep creating something few of us seemed to like.
So, I've refocused on what I like doing: writing and highlighting authors and poets. That's why there's a new poet interview available on the Bidwell Hollow blog. And that's why I'm publishing pieces on my blog.
You'll now get this email monthly instead of weekly. Each issue will include a poem for you to enjoy, links to the latest interviews and blog posts, and other fun or interesting literary things that I think you'll like.
By Clifford Brooks For behold, I create new heavens and a new earth; And the former things will not be remembered or come to mind.
Isaiah 65:17
I remember the Earth. I imagine her as a perspicacious matriculation of harsh matron and kind lady who strings green beans between the idols of Artemis, Hermes, and Heracles. It is impossible for me to think of the Earth, or creation, rebirth, or the universe without her face (much like mine without the trace of a hard line.) Her world wept when I awoke rubber bit-choked, chained to a hospital bed. A spell cast beyond our embryonic farewell held my arms down when withdrawals sprawled in bones and guts. (Enough!) She breathes relief these days as her son displays less foolish play prone to alert police.
The Earth, like the womb with a view (a good one, mind you – my first Earth), the one-room apartment it took eleven hours to leave, and I carved “Brooks was here,” down the her spine and uterine wall when it was clear my refusal wasn’t relevant. I didn’t love her (Mom) too much (or too long) or war with my father as a crutch to fulfill Freud’s Oedipal hunch. She and I laugh as Earth eats the old and allows a new generation (the same as we were) to be hated as I say, “Back in my day…”
The Earth hasn’t, God hasn’t, life-begetting-life hasn’t hewn a line to pull Pluto from an orbit to make Venus find a keenness for humans. But when you get comfy, what’s the stuff that spins us into a thicket? Eros. I met her in an emotionally-crippled condition, well-lit, preoccupied by attrition. This new, blonde Earth or principality or conflict with Hume’s causality (perhaps “purgatory” because mankind tends to fuck up perfection), is in this building, a few rooms away, probably petrified to share her insight or career while I sit here serene and sincere.
Hawaiian Nightmarchers, broken horses, rocket launchers, years of evenings overlooking Okinawa, an extraction plan in Atlanta – my harlequin idea of heroism is bent on a cauli-flowered ear. (Fear? No.) The cosmos is full of AirPods, lightning rods, Cape Cod, and Alderaan. We stand straight with our backs to fact, and over time her scarves and forever-snoozed morning alarms tie off my addictions, the contradictions
I kept like rubies thinking deception was the strongest, tallest wall.
Not at all, it is a prison silent and savage. Our language is smeared like lipstick on a mirror saying, “Go! Run now with the spirit of Invictus won!” The “I” of the covetous me, the boy in the mid-70’s set free, grown into a third person perspective with room for two, baggage abandoned on the curb. (Do not pry or disturb.) I remember the Earth.
– “I Remember the Earth,” by Clifford Brooks. Copyright 2019. Used with permission of the author.
