POETRY | ULYSSES

When the words come out

it’s to tell others “He lives up north”.

But it’s truer to say that he lives

in spaces carved long ago

by poets at desks -

our kin with quills and cave walls

who never knew the weight

of their own blessed gravity

while living -

and in the forty paces or so

of the leaf strewn tropical shade

where he first made me lower my eyes.

He lives in the quiet, giving words

and waterfalls of

“Don’t look up until I tell you”

because he is one who understands

that sometimes

the view that matters most

requires patience first,

and trust

in a guide who has gone before,

to treasure the memories you make

before the making.

I think of him, shoulder beside my own.

Aching.

He tends the garden

of each kindness he plants,

protects their tiny, secret, stubborn green

in the fraught but sweet inside,

because he already knows -

like familiar tune sung

beautifully unrehearsed -

how long you will hold the lore

of what is to be grown,

and that to recall, like poetry,

is the fearful way

humanity holds and beholds itself.

A tether,

a witness,

for better or worse.

Ask me where he lives and I’ll tell you

it’s in the soft light blue of a well-loved tee,

in the verse of Oliver and Dawe,

in Andrea’s eternal hope

more than Dan’s curated beats.

He lives at the heart of more than this.

Lives between the stardust

and scrap metal magic of me.

He’s somehow now in the first

of Vaughn Williams notes

when

I shut my eyes and listen

for his over-the-dinner table chuckle

in how the lark ascends

before war begins.

The song skips and now

he’s in the howitzer drumbeat too,

at home in the roaring vocal

as it banks hard,

bent forward,

defiant,

soaring,

reaching,

renewed.

I could look on him

for the rest of these unsettled

and halcyon days

and not live long enough with eyes

and mouth to tell you

all the ways

and of the mountain top magic I see -

that is to say he lives too,

like honey held wild in rowan tree hives,

in the brevity of a singular man-made hum

when his words land

in the neon battle zone

in my palm.

Each day,

he’s a Ulysses butterfly

gracing life and the coarse imperfect points

of these scrolling, numb hours,

unaware of the wildflowers he coaxes skyward.

The Poet I know

unravels himself,

shared for the good of the untoward world,

like ink across paper:

a quiet Carnevale of masks he has made

to survive the small stories

of even smaller men.

In whose mouths

his good name does not belong,

Unless breathed then, with apology.

But here, in the complicated light

of being human,

this human I know like Gibson knew

how to find tomorrows in the soft, pink paws

of small, unconditional things,

exists impossibly -

leans in with his sea glass stare,

unfurling, present

lovely as a white shore in broad daylight,

before the deep water of the ancient undiscovered.

He’s a calico sail, this one,

thrown in tender daring

daily to the cold salt wind,

as bright to me as the sun of

whatever uncovered grace there is

beyond bearing this grey, thin veil

of pretend.

To know him -

this indelible, upright man

with his fingertips in the gilt wheat field of forever,

and other hand on a pen -

he writes love songs to lightning,

this tumbling, beautiful, surviving boy.

Song of ink and marrow,

this clever echo of his father:

he is a carved, complex refrain,

this sweet and willful tangle

of grief and joy.

Too long has your path been storms

weary with strangers and fights

to find again your own reflection

in the fleeting beauty of raindrops.

The grateful lamp of my life

treasures, beneath my ribs,

the good and honest glow of him:

soul that remains stubbornly lit and near

in the restless dark of what ends.

There are safe places

unshaken by honest lights.

If you would find one, dear heart,

look here, take rest,

and unmasked, mend.

© Erin Brown 2026