The Complete Poems of Louis Daniel Brodsky
Volume Five, 1986-1990
edited by Sheri L. Vandermolen
Download: 850 pp.
Published: 2015
Click here to read and download the PDF
Over the course of his career, Louis Daniel Brodsky composed nearly twelve thousand poems, penning approximately eight hundred pieces from January 1986 through December 1990, as documented here, in volume five of his Complete Poems series. The verse captures the tumultuous, torturous mind-storms of a man grappling with the horrors of divorce, a writer letting conflict infuse his creative output, to spawn art that transcends the pain. But the work also denotes Brodsky's fighting spirit, his determination to move forward, both professionally, in establishing his own publishing company, and personally, in maintaining a faith in love and family.
All About Fogs
Through this saltless, oceanic fog,
Spectral headlights perforate his dream-screens.
Both pupils flex and relax sympathetically,
As if intermittently electrified.
They die, revive, wither, are revivified,
In the blinking of eyes rising from nightmare,
Through craters sloshing with humans
Neither aqueous nor vitreous,
Rather weighted with gloomy daylight,
Itself trying, tenaciously, to break through fog,
Infiltrate spirits made invisible
From their ghostly hosts, resurrect doomed souls,
For the sake of perpetuating man's paltry hope
That, one morning, he will awaken
Liberated from his flesh, his bony cargo,
And float, on the fog,
Among white leviathans, sea rhinos,
Greek clouds crowded with the redeemed
Migrating toward Orient gates —
Just one more of God's creaturely shapes
Reinventing himself exponentially,
Until, one fine morning,
He, it, discovers essential dimensionlessness,
Within Creation's womb,
Where he's taken turns, at waiting to be born,
Since primordial fogs descended.
2/17/86 (05959)
