Van K. Brock is
author of Lightered:
New and Collected Poems (2005), Unspeakable Strangers
(poems about the Holocaust, 1995), The Window (1981), a chapbook,
The Hard Essential Landscape (1979), and other collections. For
several decades he was at Florida State University and for a while was
co-director of the writing program. He helped found The Southeast
Review (then Sundog), International Quarterly
(1993-1999), and, in 1973, Anhinga Press, which he directed for 25
years. In 2000, Anhinga Press dedicated Snakebird: 30 Years of
Anhinga Poets to Brock and in 2006 named its Florida Poets Series
for Brock. His poems from Unspeakable Strangers, (“The
Hindenburg” and “This Way to the Gas”) were in the new edition of
Charles Fishman’s edition of Blood to Remember: American Poets on the
Holocaust in 2007.
He is working on a new collection Poems Swimming Underwater:
Histories, and various other groups of poems. He also writes and
edits creative non-fictions, tentatively called Dangerous Journeys or
Wanderings: Mosaics and Tesserae.In recent years he has traveled a lot, was a featured poet in the Spring 2004 Tucson Poetry Festival. His October 2005 reading in Kansas City was on New Letters on the Air for NPR. A review of Lightered: New and Selected Poems, “The Good Harvest” appeared in New Letters, Spring 2006. From April to June 2006 he taught “The Minimal Poem” at the University of Arizona Poetry Center. His essay with five poems about the effects of growing up in the American South on his poetry was in Southern Quarterly 45 (2007), Southern Poetics issue as “The Poetics of an Outsider.” He lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas, presently traveling in other centuries and time zones, he says.
Oasis
The pelican sits all day into night on a limb jutting
from dark water. The small lake abounds with prey.
When shiners swarm, easy to see, he scoops
a beakful and resumes his perch to digest, sleep.
Occasionally he flies over the bay, as far as the Gulf.
A well-groomed pregnant beauty watches from the lower
deck while a young dude fishes. Tattoos swirl
around her right forearm like ribbons. A blue heron
waits on a purple reed in the lake's clear edge
Behind it, two rusted mobile homes, an RV,
and a portajohn edge a trailer park, squatting between
the CopaCabana and plush homes. fief of a woman
who refuses to sell. Bottles and beer cans rock
on breathing water, above flotsam, cigarette butts.
The Copa houses short-to-long-term transients.
Hector, from Honduras (he's lived here longest—two years),
hardhats, a novelist, druggies, and children. No lease,
no questions, no corporate rates.
A few take short stays
in paradise. They punch through walls, leave meat to rot
in an unplugged fridge, light grills in their rooms,
ash carpets . . . . Regulars have more respect. One
quietly nurses a brownbag outside his room.
Past him on the balcony, a child chases her father.
A wind wafts through the breezeway between Bay and lake—
a god's breath. Small children wander their school's
walkways. An oldie, exiting his room, a jiggling girl,
waiting, smiles, "Have a smoke?" He turns and leaves.
With twisted blond locks, open vest, no shirt,
well-worn jeans, the guy hosing the parking lot
scratches his upper leg as he greets Manson's look-alike
(black wiry hair and mustache). They live here, work near,
when they can, want to, are able . . . . "Great morning!" A prancing
brown puppy nips their toes. The lean
muscular blond hoists the hybrid, kissing
its nuzzle.
To most, these men look dangerous. And could be.
Not homeless. This once sought love-motel, on the edge,
rents cheaply, by the week, and is home. Cats, dogs, children,
the poor, abound. Blond medusa-man's daughter
plays as he sprays away debris of extended family.
Blue Gulf past the Bay, brown lake the other side,
stay as long as you like, but pay by 11 a.m.
when due. No long term lease. No commitment. Coin laundry
available but not required. The puppy likes all scents.
An anhinga perching, wings spread, to dry her feathers,
watches the water. No oil ducts, she masters surfaces,
depths, air. Snakebird, she vanishes into water,
rises far off, trailing a lengthening V
through rippling circles that ducks, in groups, glide over
as petrels dive in and swoop out with a fish, shrieking.
—2004-2010
St. Marks' Lighthouse Wildlife Refuge
I wanted to show you this lighthouse, only a half hour away.
Its perfect simple architecture, by a grandfather's namesake.
Patches of marsh and tidepools stretch for miles around;
cattails and waterlilies and a hundred longlegged birds—
blue herons and white egrets, great and great,
brown pelicans lining sketal piers a hurricane
left.
Gray bunnies on the marsh-framed road, as curious
as we, watch us pass; alligators hide in the sea marsh,
nostrils and eyes visible;
dolphins in a frenzy,
feast on a school of mullet close to shore—
sudden thrashing of shallows, as if fighting each other—
before they swam toward the Gulf and the mullet beachward.
The bulging green bullfrog we almost stepped on—
PLOP PLOP PLOP—was as suddenly gone.
Behind the lighthouse, in shallow pools of fresh brack
named for another grandfather, a grad student finds
small fish of various colors for his room's aquarium,
bits of not quite paradise to lighten long nights.
Lightered: New & Selected Poems, Anhinga Press. (1995)
Littoral
Once on Sunday I took my sons where the sea
had thrown up sandbars and tidepools far out
from dry beach until the moist, wave-stripped
littoral had bared a nereid skin of sand
I scanned with skint eyes for the scampering
beneath it of mollusks and crustaceans
and for whatever mortared with salt spittle
the primordial architecture of minute, chimnied
castles out of broken shells, sand, and seaweed.
Fish—as if answering our motions—skipped on
top of the water. In the surf, chunks of palm trunk
tossed like huge pine cones. sand dollars visible
in tidepools that stretched over the long flats
toward the blinking eye of ageless saturation
of life and mineral in warm shallows above
the half-guessed ocean floor's terrain.
The rush of wave pulls back the shells with
blackened tin can tops, pop or beer—among
oil-tar painted rocks, chewed pilings,
and huge stones thrown up against the sea's
thrust, now worn and barnacled. We looked,
the portal gone, seaweed scattered like hair.
Whatever general answers I have given them,
denied or been unable to deny, I have
shown them where the beach drops suddenly
to dark water with waves folding and folding
themselves on sand like thick wrinkled skin
dissolving on contact with land—a being
more amorphous and strange than any in it
and connecting all the extremes in the sun's eye.
St. George Island, 1973
Published originally in North American Review. (1973)
The Hard Essential Landscape, UCF Contemporary Poetry Series. (1979)
Lightered: New & Selected Poems, Anhinga Press. (2005)
[Read more A Tribute to the Gulf Coast]
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