Poets in the South:
Conversation Within the Word. Volume One, Number One, 1977

22 Selected and New Poems by Van K. Brock:
    The Sea Birds, Lying on a Bridge, Sassafras, Spelunking, The Evidence,
    The Deer Hunt, In the Zebra, The Book of the Dead, Die Briefe, Earth Goddess,
    Buchenwald, The Mask,     Ballet Slippers, Feeding the Multitude, Owl Child,
    Her Leaf Song, Driving at Dawn,The Land of the Old Fields, Lake Country White,
    Bellair, Rites: Nightfishing, To the Injured Squirrel Found on Centerville Road.

Willie Reader,"Conversation with Van K. Brock" (an interview)

Edward Bruner, "Beyond the Lyrical Moment: The Poetry of Van K. Brock"
    a critical essay, with a response by Van K. Brock

Owl Child (from "The Nazi Innocents")

Head wide as shoulders,
Eyes dark, penniless pockets,
He lies awake, owl

Of the waste places,
Staring into his eyelids.
He has seen hard facts

Dreams cannot gloss. Eyes
pull toward the brain's occlusions.

The Sea Birds

No light except the stars, but from the cliff
I saw in motion, out on the rolling waves,
The white sea birds that swim beyond the surf.

Their movements made a pattern on the mauve
Contorted stretch of cold, corrosive water,
Where even the images of stars dissolve.

When I had thought the birds were fixed in order,
I saw the swimming rim of their starlit ring
Minutely swerve and spiral toward the center.

The birds that had been swimming in between
Were shuttled outward on a wheel of light,
Reflecting, like the sea, the stars' design.

I paused, and looked, and saw a star burn out
And sink back into space as through a fissure.
It was an ancient word without a thought.

Perhaps birds move in pattern for the measure
It imposes on the ruptured waves at night;
Perhaps they spiral purely for their pleasure.

While I was trying to untie this knot,
A motion in the motion of the weather
Turned, and the birds turned too and tore the net

I knitted for them (a star had torn another
I had knitted for stars). I saw them climb the gale
That drove small arrows in through every feather.

One by one they spread their flapping sails.
And no one shall put salt on their bright tails.
originally in The New Yorker Magazine

The Evidence

My son kept wanting a snake.
That day our walk went
to a wooded hill near the school,
where we found on a winding path,
suddenly widening,
the burned and shrivelled
plastic flesh
of toy men among
thirty or forty long
wooden match stems,
their red-and-white heads charred
where the first spurts of fire
had startled nervous hands.
The evidence lay there,
almost looking unstruck,
surrounding
soldiers dressed for a battle
more real than themselves,
several fused in a mass.
Here and there, others,
apart, were equally deformed.
Among them, unharmed,
was a lone survivor
and beside him, one match
unstruck. I let my son
bring the survivor home
and kept the match.
We found no snake.
Now it is late,
the neighborhood is still,
I sit in the living room
run my thumbnail
through the match's head
and watch it spurt
white, blue, red
and go out.
It doesn't help.
As light after light goes out
in the thousand houses
matches in around me
a child is striking
matches in his sleep.

   Iowa City, 1969
   After "the Pinkville Incident"
   (Code name for My Lai Massacre)