LOVE POEM THAT LEADS ME TO A FLORIDA CANAL The bandoneon transports me to your lips relaxed as they are like orchids on a late summer trellis. Orchids climbing the trellis of your throat. Orchids like verbs struggling with existence. Orchids like lovers from the grave, as lovers often appear from graves. Beautiful. Impossible to resist in their splendor of Spanish moss with night herons perched on giant oak shoulders circling the moon’s silver waist. Oak moon. My moon, tumbled dry so many times that wisdom separated itself from young poets who occasionally slip from their conscious minds. A caballero strikes a match in a Juarez cantina; older women sway; young girls flock like minnows beneath a swollen crust of bread floating on a Florida canal.
– by Alan Britt
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Alan Britt’s recent books are Hurricane (2010), Vegetable Love (2009), Vermilion (2006), Infinite Days (2003), Amnesia Tango (1998) and Bodies of Lightning (1995). Britt’s work also appears in the new anthologies, American Poets Against the War, Metropolitan Arts Press, 2009 and Vapor transatlántico (Transatlantic Steamer), a bi-lingual anthology of Latin American and North American poets, Hofstra University Press/Fondo de Cultura Económica de Mexico/Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos de Peru, 2008.
Politically speaking Alan has started the Commonsense Party, which ironically to some sounds radical. He believes the US should stop invading other countries to relieve them of their natural resources including tin, copper, bananas, diamonds and oil. He is quite fond of animals both wild and domestic and supports prosecuting animal abusers to the fullest extent of the law and then some. As a member of PETA, he is disgusted by factory farming and decorative fur. Alan currently teaches English/Creative Writing at Towson University and lives in Reisterstown, Maryland with his wife, daughter, two Bouviers des Flandres, one Bichon Frise and two formerly feral cats. Copyright © 2010 by Alan Britt. All Rights Reserved.
Very good! Reading this poem, I am reminded of a poetry collection from the past that remains on my shelf, Alan Britt’s “Infinite Days” from The Bitter Oleander Press, and all of its fine natural correspondences and choice cultural allusions here and there.