Sample Poems by James Brock

Killing the Exotics

First, my backyard, the Cuban laurel
tree, neither Cuban nor laurel, would be
a good start, but with its
leaf and creeper, it keeps the St. Augustine
grass at bay. So I am left to contemplate
the killing of the other exotics, the available
snake plants, those variegated swords with
tendrilled tubers, and thus I have begun to go
native in Florida. Sure, I have
thinned the ligustrums and shell-ginger lily,
sheared the croton, but I am still learning
the names of exotics: you, carrotwood, you corn
plant, you bird of paradise and
jacaranda, you bougainvillea, frangipani,
banana, Hong Kong orchid tree, you
umbrella plant and Mexican heather, you Surinam
cherry and valencia orange, and you
weeping bottlebrush and you whatever,
all of you an Ohioed dream of Florida, so much backdrop
for The Creature from the Black Lagoon, I say
must go. But who would
not want that kind of 3-D Florida
in 1954, to be startled
by it, after a hard day of filming, even if it’s just
a B-movie, to be Ben Chapman, spending six
hours latexed in a modified diving suit, half
an alligator boy’s body from the roadside
attraction and the rest a Chinatown fish-dragon’s
head, carrying around slinky Julia Adams all day,
and finally unzipping the gill-man’s mask,
freeing his head to the subtropic air
and light? Of course, what Ben Chapman
wants first is a good smoke, then a high-ball,
and the next day a round of golf, a trip
to Palm Beach for a quick fuck, and he
thinks he could very well live here, forget
Pasadena and snap up that tiny
bungalow in Sanibel, grow mangoes and oranges
and Brazilian pepper, and go fishing
out in the Gulf of Mexico.
What might he leave after he goes? A Florida worth a little
killing? Today, I believe my neighbor’s bishofia 
might be an even better start,
save for that downy woodpecker, behind me, holed up
in the dead arm of the Cuban laurel tree,
that
one-ounced brute, eyeing me.

Her Silvermoon Café

Sleep and you have astronomy,
or maybe her Silvermoon Café,

where you cannot find your brother,
the twelve-step pornographer,
or your brother,
the de-barred embezzler,
or your brother,
the post-Victorian oboist.

Sleep and you have astronomy,
or maybe her Silvermoon Café,

where you cannot find your sister,
the shop-lifting enabler,
or your sister,
the special educationist stripper,
or your sister,
the merchant marine chemist.

Sleep and you have astronomy,
or maybe her Silvermoon Café,

where someone else has snapshot
three women laughing, beneath
the shack’s sign, a crescent moon
and star—is this a still from
a Hollywood set? Or you could believe
the women are swamp mermaids,
and there’s no need saying
voluptuous mermaids at that.
Of course, with mermaids
in any poem, you have to think
of T.S. Eliot’s mermaids not singing
to him, but who would be surprised
at that? And would you not hear
the laughter, too, rising to the ceiling
of your sleep, firing nebulae, star
matter, and gravity? Whose laughter,
then? And what is that you do
when you sleep and wrong the world?

Upon Hearing That My Grant Application Was Passed Over and the Winner Was a Bio-Tech Professor Who Has Designed Genetically-Altered Protein for Buckwheat Seed
                —for Denise

Okay, call me Tallulah Bankhead. I wanted that award,
the crystal glass eagle, the pendant, the certificate,
the lapel pin, the thousand bucks, and the parking space
next to the university president’s spot—the whole
platinum and sapphire tiara. I knew I should have
written that poem on the manipulations
of amino acid balance in buckwheat seed proteins.
I knew I should have named that new genetic
strand Omicron-Brockide-32, should have brokered
the patent rights to Monsanto, let them spread the seed
of my pumped-up, high-octane, drought-tolerant,
American-can-do-know-how buckwheat
to sub-Sahara Africa and southern Mongolia.

One year later, then, I would have written
the grant report, presented it to the committee
on PowerPoint, and finished off my presentation
with a streaming video clip, showing some adolescent
boy, from Gambia, say, and he would be eating
my buckwheat flat bread, and there he would be,
digitalized, smiling, full, and muscular. Yes,
and at that moment, vindicated and wise,
teary-eyed and generous, the grant committee
would gather and lift me on their shoulders, laughing
and singing, joyful for all the corporate sponsorships that
would follow me and bless our humble home
institution. For me, dare I dream further confirmations?
O, to be Nationally Endowed, Guggenheimed, MacArthured!

 Of course, in Gambia, and other geographies
beneath the sweep and hoozah of fellowships
and announcements in The Chronicle of Higher Education,
the newly nourished could be striking the flint
of their first syllables of their first poems, poems
whose phrases—under the most subdued of flames—would
coolly scorch and burn our best American intention.