Two Poems
Barbara Swift Brauer


 
Elegy for the Naturalist 

When he left
my father took nothing          
of his long life.
 
The world remains.
 
Every shoot and early leaf,
every bird note
in the restless canopy.
 
Each star in its orbit,
the sky flung wide
above the Texas desert. 


Storm Blows in from the Coast

​The music begins
in the wind-whipped trees,
storm rhythms
intensify as the flood
rises in water time.
                       
A bay tree falls, splays branches
over road and fences,
the spaces of the sky                                                              
still visible
between its leaves.
 
Nothing remains
in the old containers.
Water, the color of hillsides,
is everywhere, glossy
with the sheen of the day.
 
Oh but the night is black.
We lean into the candlelight,
adjust our schedules,
face the windy dark
one halo at a time.
 
The small globes flicker.
 
Day, the wild-eyed storm
gone from the yards,
leaves us shipwrecked
in our debris.              
 
Rings on a cut log
precise as a gunwale.
 
We carry the mermaids,
dripping, back to their coves
as the sea clears.





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About the Author: Barbara Swift Brauer is a freelance writer living in San Geronimo, California. Her poems have appeared in journals, anthologies, and art exhibitions. With portrait artist Jackie Kirk, she is co-author of the nonfiction book, Witness: The Artist's Vision in The Face of AIDS (Pomegranate Artbooks, 1996). Her poetry collection, At Ease in the Borrowed World, was published by Sixteen Rivers Press in 2013. Her forthcoming collection, Rain, Like a Thief, will be published by Sixteen Rivers in April 2019

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