Why
the gods put fire in Lightered and hid
it
Coyote
stole kindling from the big hogan.
That
winter coyote needed it. Exhausted by excuses
and usual
laziness, he wanted to get ahead quick,
like
his daddy, who had been big stuff forever.
Chief
got pneumonia a week later, never breathed right again.
Spider
Woman had warned him when she gave him lightered.
Coyote
set the plains on fire with that one piece of fat wood.
Buffalo,
rabbits, foxes, birds—smell of barbecue everywhere.
So the
winds came together and gave Coyote the name
they
howl all winter. Nobody ever
trusted Coyote after that.
Now Coyote
sits on the plain alone and howls his own name.
Thinks
he's one of the winds now, own judge and executioner.
from Lightered: New and Selected Poems
Van
K. Brock is a poet to cherish — and read! — for his sense (w isdom)
and skill in bringing the secrets of our time to us without spoiling the mystery.
These lightered poems give brief strong light to family tragedies, evidence
of ancient, too-present crime. And there are folk tunes here, much music in
the words for dancing, fields of sunflowers, washing screaming to be hung
"in the sun like saved sinners."
—
Michael Mott
Scholarship,
love of nature and family, honoring through poetry of art, music, and travel,
in-dignant witnessing to history's evil absurdities — these and many
other passions assure the power of Brock's chromatics. He hears even the shards
of mosaics as songs that awaken epiphanies, and there's grief in his poems
that we are too often fragmentary man, with some parts — perhaps the
most essential for our humanity — unfinished. I've followed his work
for years. I value this up-todate definitive collection.
— David Ray
Lightered's
title refers to highly combustible, sap-rich pine, and Brock's poems —
suffused with a strong sense of public and private history, Dixie-haunted,
world-struck—sizzle and snap on the tongue and in the mind. Brock knows
how to brush just enough strangeness into our speech to make it sing and to
make it last. He's been to the sacred wood and brought back fire.