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On the Occasion of the Last Old Camp Meeting in Llano County

​Go down & drink with crawdads & catfish
     in the river bottom gorged on garbage & rain
          in the diminished West where a drive
               without gas stations feels commonplace.
                    Let erasure establish its kingdom of heat,
               sweat, & sinners endless as the wildflowers
          outside church each Sunday. You cannot petition
     the fawn’s scattered remains or the peacock’s echo.
& forget about trying to teach the coyotes to eat
     from your hand or the snakes to twitch lovingly
          at seeing you after you step on them. Doubt
               led me to death’s edge, & I blindly followed
          as the moths do light’s blueing arc through this
     darkness, splitting open where feeling emerges from flesh
as bone can from knuckle—naked as the witness of the newly
     converted man in the tent who does not say at the faith
          revival, Without a miracle to need, I became a singing . . .
               though he has often overhead himself speaking
                    a cryptic & rootless language that before
               conversion he felt sure was secret—his own
          —not the Spirit’s. I love his Pentecostal tongue
     reaching into the syllabic ether of naming each time
it praises. I love his human need for expression of phenomena
     well beyond explanation. He sees a star & concludes
          it’s God’s eye. He hears the rain & imagines
               Christ’s body evaporating on Golgotha’s hill.
                    Lord, how I want to praise him. Though
               I cannot believe what he believes, I see beauty
          in him that is so substantial it makes even my skeptic’s
     rib ache with passion. Here we blur together, faces inter-
secting in the river’s vision, which is our reflections’ sudden
     de-creation back to Adam’s voice box like the bridge’s
          music as cars pass between us & our singing rises
               through the dark of naming. Highway, sky,
                    steel truss, the light on each steel truss, the bolts
               on the bridge’s cross beams: all of these are sacred.
          Praise this structure’s creators, its silent welders
     who are unknowable. Praise the penitent soul &
the unbeliever’s despite disagreeing about metaphysics.
     Praise a six-pack knowing what our language cannot.
          Praise the gesture that saves even when faith cannot.
               May we meet as two equals on this bridge again

to drink Bud Light & be the blood brothers we were before revelation.
 
​
by J. Scott Brownlee

​J. Scott Brownlee is a poet-of-place from rural Texas. His work appears widely and includes the prize-winning chapbooks Highway or Belief (Button Poetry, 2013), Ascension (Texas Review Press, 2015), and On the Occasion of the Last Old Camp Meeting in Llano County (Tree Light Books, 2016). His first full-length collection, Requiem for Used Ignition Cap (Orison Books, 2015), was selected by C. Dale Young as the winner of the Orison Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Poetry Series. He teaches for Brooklyn Poets as a core faculty member and currently lives in Philadelphia.
ISSN 2157-8079
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