Three Poems

by Brian Culhane

DU TEMPS PERDU

It happens

Sometimes that a

Page break

Resembles

Its prior self by

Which I mean

The blank gulf

Before

Any typed

Letters cross

Your path reader

But know

This at least

You

Too break at times

Contemplating your own past

Blankness

Don’t you

Desirous of A researche

du temps perdu

Only

To find a mizmaze

A relic

Merely

A name

Circling

Your earlier selves

Take the Breamore

Mizmaze for

Instance

Which can only be

Reached on

Foot

“press the green button by

the gates and they

will open”

Or so

It

Is hoped

Else the past

Appears

All for naught even

If “it is

really worth

visiting”

ROSEBUD, I SHALL WHISPER

How wondrous

To expire

Like that

Murmuring a

Riddle

To eternity

Rise bud

Rise Bob

Rose bulb

Just what did he

Say just now

Huh

O Lord of

The nearly

Dearly departed

Grant me at the end

Neither pity nor

Terror

But allow

In the shuttered

Sickroom

Some artifact

Of lost

Beatitude say

A child’s

Snow-

Globe

Symbol of what

Long ago

Appeared

Breathtaking

Mystical

Profound

The glassy sphere

Denying all

Misunderstandings

Mistakes

Misalliances

And

All the ludic

Extravagances

Entertained

In the course

Of a wayward

Life

To be shaken

Turned

Upside-down

Until my hand

Like Kane’s

Opens

Its tiny

Blizzard

The last happiness

LISTENING TO ÓLAFUR ARNALDS

In this time of

Plague and hidden

Lives

In a winter where

Likenesses

Arrive eerily say

Walking in the park

Any park

Any city

Seeing a snowstorm

Gather

Momentum

Building intensity

One can

Easily extend this

To what has been lost

All these months

Indoors

Couch a raft

Flea market rug

A sea my screen

Mirrorless

As well water

Blank at my touch

Or alive with flakes

Swirling

Photons

The tunes best

Understood

Must be

Strings voice

Electronics

Programmed drum

Elementary

Piano motifs

Interwoven

One titled

Loom another

Back to the Sky

These

Icelandic songs

Ideal for this season

Glacially slow

Minimalist

Oddly soothing so

Tonight

Adrift on my

Sea-green rug

I imagine

Ólafur Arnalds

Repeating his name

He is looking at

A lava field

He is out strolling

Where two tectonic

Plates meet

Then finds

The cleft's mouth

Ólafur Arnalds Ólafur

Arnalds he shouts

On reaching the point

Stalagmite

Meets stalactite

Bare ruined choir

Of water

Dripping over and

Over

On calcium salts

A stone hourglass

Terrible in

The pitch of dark

With no one listening

Back to the sky

He slowly turns back

To the sky

BIO: Brian Culhane’s poetry has appeared in such places as The Paris Review, The New Republic, Blackbird, and Boulevard. He’s written two collections: The King’s Question (Graywolf Press), which won the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Foundation, and more recently, Remembering Lethe (Able Muse Press). New work is forthcoming in The Hudson Review, The National Poetry Review and Plume. He lives in Seattle.