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Best Poems Written by Douglas Brown

Below are the all-time best Douglas Brown poems as chosen by PoetrySoup members

Details | Douglas Brown Poem

Los Angeles

After we met
I thought we really had something,
Really hit it off.
It wasn’t the words we spoke,
The easy fluorescent trail they made.
Maybe it was the Japanese lantern
Glowing over your bare shoulder
Or the smile you threw
To the side- 
To someone.
Or maybe it was the cool damp air,
Slight seduction of rain
But no rain.
Perfect, cool molecules,
Layer on layer,
Air sitting on air.

But after, I couldn’t find you.
I couldn’t find you
In the heavy-sitting valleys,
Behind the cool barriered hedges
With stone guard dogs,
In the palm shadowed boulevards
Or the canyon mazes.
I couldn’t find you
In the final exhalations of space,
On sun baked, cracked cement plaza drives.
I couldn’t find you
In the starkly lined avenues
Amongst the serious-expressioned manikins.

It really is a desert here, huh?
Had said the pale cheeked waiter from Wisconsin
While we waited for you to come back.
Yes, I thought, touching the sweating water glass.
A stage set in a desert
Filled with mirages and promises
And doors that no one answers
And roads that curve toward the sun.
We both knew you weren’t coming back.

I won’t find you again
But I will keep looking
And looking
And looking.
There is always that chance.
Yes, to find someone like you.
That chance.
I leave alone,
Tip under plate.
A dog barks at my steps,  
Waits, barks again.

We are both close, 
Yet impossibly, 
Far from home.

Details | Douglas Brown Poem

Chasing the Alligator

We have lost our sense of humor.

		We chase the alligator 
		down Front Street,
		past Mollies Convenience Store
		and the County Clerk- Recorder Office.

		He’s taken us under
		a red sky grand,
		hardly noticed.

		Were it not for the children
		riding on his back,
		we would let him go.

		They sit on him,
		smooth as a new wallet,
		shoes, purse.

		Where in our imagination, 
		we ask ourselves,
		have we seen this kind of thing before?
		Yes, where?

		Following the tip of his tail
		as he heads for the culvert
		we move as one,
                an army
                uncertain of its purpose.

Details | Douglas Brown Poem

Golden Shackles

We played 
Scrabble until the word Bali came up-
and you were gone.

That night
your pillow
smelled of ocean breezes, coconut and
heliconia.
When you came back-
I want to be free.

I built a body balloon
around you
and filled it with helium.
I let out the tether 
and you went up and up
and up
to the jet stream.
I released the tether.

A man in a 747, 
business class,
saw you float by.
I want her-
he wrote in his day planner.

Soon, you fell and fell
towards the African forest
and into a tree.
A leopard started to climb
up to you
but you dropped onto the back
of an elephant
who carried you 
into a brightly lit 
camp
with a table, tablecloth, candles, wine
and gold silverware-
Ah, there you are, my dear.

You ate and drank
and awoke
covered with golden shackles.
The leopard slept beneath you
snuffing as though in a dream.

Above you
a taunting helicline made of gold keys
lead back
to
our little room
under the eaves,
and the rain
and days filled
with nothing.

Details | Douglas Brown Poem

The Viewing

The Viewing

She wore it that weekend
After he bought it at the drugstore
with eight dollars
they didn’t have.
Rent money.
Food.
It was a man’s Timex
and she wore it
in the motel.
She wore it in the waves
at the beach in Coronado.
The hands froze
and sand collected.
She wore it to the wedding.
She wore it on their honeymoon.
A night on Catalina.
Eleven-thirty eight.
She said that was when they 
fell in love.
She wore it to the hospital
until the doctor talked about
stillborn and heart beats.
Then it was gone.
And she.

Now, forty-five years later
he waited until everybody
walked past her.
Nobody knew
husband number one 
from long ago.
A grandchild smiled at him.
Some lawyer had found him.
Finally he got up.
He couldn’t  look at her face
but saw her wrist
with the Timex watch.
The wrist underneath
that he used to kiss
leading to other things
and a baby
with no breath, blue.
He saw the hour’s hand
floating on the sand 
on the dial.
Minutes still thirty-eight.
He saw her hair floating
In the wind
And the sea rushing to engulf her
And take her
For the moment.
And reappear
like now
laughing,
love really not lost
at all.

Details | Douglas Brown Poem

Boundary Waters

The man rested his paddle carefully
next to the bundle.
  My favorite time of day.
  Dusk.
The light was soft,
The water still as lakeside glass,
insects skimming over touching,
laying down a perfect parabola 
and then touching again.
He still felt her kiss and touch
on cheek and hand.
He smiled at the bundle.
Everything I need and more.
Sometime back a ways,
paddling easy in a light chop,
he had forgotten to worry about it.
  What did doctors know.
Resting, he had taken a cookie
from the bundle and ate it,
looking at each bite before.

Dusk left him and the canoe went on,
  paddle easy,
  paddle strong, paddle easy, paddle strong.
Surely, he had crossed it by now.
And surely who gives a-
His sudden laughter startled a Great Blue Heron.
It flew up, its wings a miracle.
The man let the canoe drift 
and looked to the beautiful darkening sky.
He took another cookie from the bundle.
  I am ready.
  I am ready.

Details | Douglas Brown Poem

A Detective In the House

The clues are there.
The notes.
The writing.
The phone numbers.
The calendar.
Especially the calendar
holding all the secrets
of what was done and will be done.

He is bent over the cubby-holed desk,
slippers, flannel bathrobe,
searching through the familiar
and seeing only the hidden, 
the missing,
the opaque.

The crime?
Something stolen, precious 
and worse,
it is just out of sight, 
next to the words, 
the notes, the writing,
the calendar.
Especially the calendar.
So obvious the number,
the day,
yet not now the season.

He finds her worried face again
and continues.

All those around him
keep it from him-
the secret is- 
nothing is gone,
nothing was done.

The detective searches
for himself in the clues
of unravelling time.

Details | Douglas Brown Poem

The Wild Parrots of Hollywood

He cried
after she held him.
(He had told her 
this wasn’t his first time.)

Back then the window had been filled
with parrots in the palm trees.
They scrawed and heeched
And k-k-ee’d.
She had picked him up 
and held him 
and they both looked out,
eyes wide,
as he called back to them-
Kee-kee! Haaaw! Schsch!Schsch!

All this he did not say
to her now.
The parrots were gone,
And she was gone.

But she tightened
around him.
The sound he heard,
years away and apart,
was the same.
And now what she knew-
Green and yellow
flashes
and the many,
straining,  beating hearts.

Details | Douglas Brown Poem

The Beautiful Hunger

She could see pink
over the vanity that her husband had built.
Someone had removed its mirror,
oh, long ago 
and put it in the alcove with the window
so she could sit and look over the cemetery and 
into the mountains.
She could see the pink
and the vault of warmth over
the mountains,
and some purple glowing on the rises;
even through cataracts.
But not the lights of the helicopter
flying over Alhambra.
She used to take a daily walk
to Obregon Park
and even to Belvedere School to watch
her granddaughter play.
But now her granddaughter watched her
and carefully laid her in bed
after she fell asleep in the alcove.
Tonight she felt the hand on her shoulder
and saw her nieta place food
on the small table next to her.
I can smell  snow on the peaks.
I am not hungry.
I want to be eaten.
Nieta drew back.
You mean eaten by God?
She only smiled and turned back to the window.

			*
The wolf looked out at the valley
And saw an enormous bathing of pink and orange light
which caused cubs nearby to sniff the air
and pause before rolling in the snow, 
fighting.
She sniffed for his smell
but it was not there.
She sniffed for the Early People
whose bones she had found.
Nothing.
A cub rushed her and she snarled weakly.
Where is the mother?
Then some meat was dropped
at the cave’s entrance. 
She sniffed it and settled more deeply
into the cave’s  bedding. 
She looked down at the moving ribbons
of white and red which always blossomed at night.
I want to be eaten.
By the Early People
with their clean killing
not shot at from strange mechanical birds.
I am ready to be eaten.
She looked out across the ribbons
and the pink and sniffed the air.
There is someone.
There is someone.
A wolf in a woman’s heart.
			*
Nieta found her with her eyes
and her mouth wide open 
staring down this time.
She paused before she lifted her up
and looked out into
the faded pink sky,
the purple rises and the faded strokes of sun.
And then she thought-
What a good day to be eaten.
A woman in a wolf’s heart!
Must be the stories
that my grandmother told me of the Early People.
This time she was not embarrassed
to have these thoughts.
                    *
She put her gently in bed and covered her
and hurried down to her own daughter’s bed,
the hospice nurse's phone number in her pocket,
and got under the covers.
She held her tightly until she could
feel the gentle thump – thump - thump 
and protect her from the inevitable, beautiful
hunger.

Details | Douglas Brown Poem

Trip To the Black Sea

How to write about such a thing?

Stalin in his vacation train
across Ukraine to Sochi-
Eating and drinking,
full, talkative.
A smoke or two.
A nap.

And the children in the barracks
wanting only to die outside in the air,
brother clutching sister,
Sister sister.
Bread,
and then nothing.

Oysters, salmon, pork loin,
Steamed vegetables-wine.
He ate what they could not
imagine in a dream.

They dreamed of dying with the clouds.
He of wheat harvested
by skeletons.

Details | Douglas Brown Poem

No Words

She was with me up until
What was it?
The 37th or 44th visit.
A smile.
A word. Or two.
Time to pee.

Fluorescent lights
Smiling laughing nurses.
Good-hearted.
A few dim with their own thoughts.
But carefully not carrying anyone else’s.

The best built machines were in rooms by themselves.
Quiet.

Attendants smoked outside
and dark-faced figures carrying
lifeless flowers hurried by,
practiced words trailing behind them.

I am in the wrong wing.
A woman escapes her straps,
her red hair and speech wild.
Her body no use anymore
but to get out of.
She is gently tied to a chair and talks to
me as I go by - explaining her plans.

This floor smells of the Wait.
Other wives, grandmothers, mothers talk in front of sadly
hanging televisions each with many important words.
Their diapers are a final ridicule for
a lifetime of great earned knowledge.

Where are the men?

I am walking down hallway after hallway.
Color coded floors lead me past you
I am sure and past you once more.
I need to ask at the desks again
and again, I am lost.

You have been moved
and you can’t tell me.

There were many words I had needed 
to know.
Important terms.
Stage four.
Metastasis. 
Early on- alopecia. 

What do I do with them now?

I find the room. You.
I am lost in the 
untethered, frayed end of explanation.
And terms. 

And you are unmoored,
waiting. Patient.
Drifting.

At the end we both, finally,
share no words.

Like in our beginning
when no words
was love.