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
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.