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Two
poems from Brent Hendrick's Everything
followed
by a note on the author
Everything
Friends
should learn to think differently about leaving –
everything goes away:
the sun, clouds,
even stars become nothing after a while
* * *
Remember when we found that old mill by the stream?
The fallen walls, leaves
dropping, ancient mounds
of archeology
Remember being 13?
The angle of the light?
And how we slipped down
into the smell of earth,
kissed in the deep gash
where the wheel used to be?
A
Poem from Another Century
I
was living in your body for one reason –
you asked me to. Some days
we'd walk through the glimmering city,
down to the river that curved among buildings,
where we'd sit for hours along the water.
There you'd read to me from the same book,
always a poem from another century, a poem about water,
and while the wind blew across the pages
we'd think about the words, the brightness of water,
and our thinking was entwined
with a dream we had each night,
actually your dream about me, how I
was reading from a book in the middle of a river,
a book of mirrors, read backwards in my hands,
a book about the history of water.
©
Brent Hendricks was born in Sapulpa, Oklahoma
in 1958, and was educated at Harvard Law School and the University
of Arizona, where he obtained his JD and MFA. He lives in Tuscaloosa,
Alabama, and is a full-time writer. His poems have appeared in
Poetry, Ploughshares, Iowa Review, Southern
Review, New Review of Literature, Carolina Quarterly,
Prairie Schooner and Black Warrior Review. He was
a recent finalist for the Sarabande Award, National Poetry Series.
"Everything"
first appeared in Ploughshares, and "A Poem from Another
Century" first appeared in Carolina Quarterly.
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