Daniel Brown

“Face the Nation”
 
I would have preferred cartoons if there’d been any
On. (Just a handful of channels back then, remember.)
Poor substitute for lippy critters, these
Blabbing suits.  Plus what were they talking about?
I suppose I followed scattered bits of it…
Which I couldn’t say for a lot of the commercials.
Some major stumpers there. Like that injunction
To “Get a Piece of the Rock” (as in of Gibraltar),
The point of buying, what, a boulder’s worth
Being left, to a kid, way underspecified.
More puzzling still were spots that weren’t trying
To peddle anything in particular;
That contented themselves with a vague communiqué
On the order of “We Bring Good Things to Life.”
Not that I felt a need to ask about them
(Any more than I was curious
Enough to probe an abiding mystery
In the medicine chest with “Tampax” blazoned on it).
It was as though that hunter who chased a bear
Past a suspicious fissure in Kentucky
Hadn’t been sufficiently intrigued
To pull up, poke his noggin into it
And feel his eyes whitening in wonder
At a cavern-world that underlay three states,
For all he could see its end… Or maybe a better
Likening would be to a troglodyte
Who eyes a million-moted shaft of light
Upward to a cavern’s roof without
Shinnying up an icicle of lime
To see where such a beam is coming from:
A realm of mighty, mirror-sided towers
Blazing unto blinding in the sun,
From the pinnacles of which annunciations
Flash height to height (as 747’s
Semaphore themselves to one another
Miles above the traffic jams).  Of course
Such messaging is also targeted
At the swarmers in the streets, its rosy glow
Making them less likely to begrudge
Their overlords the running of the world.

Daniel Brown’s poems have appeared in Poetry, Partisan Review, PN Review, Raritan, National Review, and other journals, as well as in a number of anthologies including Poetry 180 (ed. Billy Collins) and The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets (ed. David Yezzi). His work has been awarded a Pushcart prize, and his collection Taking the Occasion (Ivan R. Dee, 2008) won the New Criterion Poetry Prize. His latest collection is What More? (Orchises Press, 2015). His criticism of poets and poetry has appeared in The Harvard Book Review, The New Criterion, PN Review, The Hopkins Review and other journals, and the LSU Press has published a critical book of his, Subjects in Poetry. His Why Bach? and Bach, Beethoven, Bartok are audio-visual ebooks available at Amazon.com.