"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.
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