5 Poems by John Brantingham

Against the Sky

The hiding game the crows
played with me up there
in the trees is over
now that the leaves
have Novembered
to the ground.
These days the birds
shadow themselves
against the gray.
I think they’re not calling
each other as much today.
Not that I can tell.
The cold of this month
clarifies the world,
their place and mine.
I stand under their tree.
Those last few leaves cling
to branches impossibly.

Francisco Goya's 

The Disasters of War: For a Clasp Knife

Goya’s priest is garrotted to a pole, dagger
stuck in his chest, so it can hold a note naming
his crime, possession of a knife, making
this death worse, I suppose, as though murder
might have been acceptable if it were less
inappropriate as though the crime wasn’t
killing, but being so indifferent,
and he has a point. It’s needless, callous.
But Goya has learned to live in a world
where some murders are just wrong, suggesting
that others are right. The brutality
of life has worked its way into his blood
and into mine. Looking at his painting,
my first thought was how tragic the note’s irony.

The Disasters of War: Gloomy Presentiments of What Is to Come

Goya’s man is on his knees looking
helplessly to heaven, the rags he wears
instead of his shirt are torn, and his cares
have etched themself on his face. He’s begging
God or probably at this point anything
that might hear the words of his despair.
This man is wise enough to try prayer
although his faith is obviously shrinking.
What else is there for him, for all of us
who know what comes next when some bully
feels pouty and decides to scorch the land?
What better strategy than to fall to our knees
and beg, hoping that God isn’t whiny,
that this tyranny isn’t what he planned?

Paul Klee’s Cat and Bird

The cat always has the bird on his mind,
or so Klee seems to tell us. The cat hunts
him constantly, watches for the moment
to pounce, tries to come up with new kinds
attacks, new ways to pin him down. The cat
is colorful, attractive, but when he thinks
of the bird is it bloody, and it stinks
of recent death. It’s best consumed quickly, still hot.
I don’t know what Klee was thinking when he
composed Cat and Bird. I know that he liked
cats, but also he painted this in 1928,
when Hitler was just getting to be
seen and heard. When he talked about Jew, he spoke
with a passionately intense new brand of hate.


Paul Klee’s Before the Snow


Basho reminds us that time passes,
that we are in a middle moment
that we always are, that will were always meant
to die, and that is just fine. Basho shows
us that the inbetween is where we all
live, and had he been born in a different
time and place perhaps he would have painted
this haiku that says all of that and is visual.
Klee reminds us that the moment between
moments is surreal, even magical,
and that is good because it’s all we have.
Klee reminds us to straighten up when
we’ve been looking down to see how full
the world is, how beauty is like a salve.


Paul Klee’s Archangel

The archangel is elegant and seems
awfully sure of himself. He raises
one angry eyebrow as he gazes
down to earth. His lips are pursed and demean
whichever sinner he watches now.
The archangel can clarify what is sin,
and we’re down here in a muddle wishing
he’d explain what good and evil are all about.
Not that there isn’t objective reality.
Not that we can’t point to this or that and say
it’s wrong or right, but the archangel’s
seems certain of his own morality,
as certain as a bishop that there is no way
for him to ever be wrong and to grow.

Bionote

John Brantingham is currently and always thinking about radical wonder. He is a New York State Council on the Arts Grant Recipient for 2024, and he was Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks’ first poet laureate. His work has been in hundreds of magazines and The Best Small Fictions 2016 and 2022. He has twenty-two books of poetry, nonfiction, and fiction.