"Saturday Chaconne" - Clifford Brooks

"Saturday Chaconne" - Clifford Brooks

Damon and Pythias

shake off Syracuse,

and brush their shoulders clean.

In downtown Athens

short skirts scoot us up one street,

then left on College Avenue.

Brothers head into a hookah bar.

Jackson’s secondhand bookshop

contains collections

by Rilke, Neruda, and Simic

whose woo factor

hit their limit.

Now they’re here

with scribbled epitaphs

that whisper: The heart doesn’t

always win.

Nor is family loyal to their tortured son.

So, I decide to inscribe my insanity

in a tattoo venue.

Now, the motto of my family’s melancholy

is carved into muscle over time.

The blood spilt in that chair

is theirs as much as mine.

Finem Respice

is forever

on my left arm.

On Four Fat Tires, we careen

into the old decor of New Orleans.

This eatery has been renamed,

but it’s still the same.

Dad sits inside, smiling:

My old man

is always smiling.

We watch the waning sun

set across Broad Street

over the Arches

that urge us to understand

that the ache of youth passes,

age has a slanted perspective,

and nothing is wasted with good company.

As evening winks in,

dogwood lets petals drift.

Clifford Brooks (www.cliffbrooks.com) was born in Athens, Georgia His second full-length poetry volume, Athena Departs: Gospel of a Man Apart, as well as a limited-edition poetry chapbook, Exiles of Eden, were published in 2017. His first poetry collection, The Draw of Broken Eyes & Whirling Metaphysics, was re-issued in August 2018. Evergreens, his second chapbook, will be released by Lucid House Publishing in 2019. Clifford is the founder of The Southern Collective Experience (www.southerncollectiveexperience.com), a cooperative of writers, musicians and visual artists, which publishes the journal of culture The Blue Mountain Review and hosts the NPR show Dante’s Old South. He is on the faculty of The Company of Writers, and provides tutorials on poetry through the Noetic teaching application.