Mid-afternoon, December 31, 2025. I was in bed here at my wife's ancestral home in Roxas, Isabela. I checked on my smartphone and found this email from Evergreen Review bearing, Tree and Other Poems by Brian Swann. As far as I know, it's my first time to read this poet. And I was immediately absorbed by the subdued intensity and restrained beauty that suffuse the poems from first line to last. (Spoiler alert: I'm sharing below the end parts of each poem, so you - who is perhaps my one and only reader - better read first the entire three short poems now!)
From Tree:
where the world opens out to itself so you can go on forever,
a tree is surrounded by trees and this the one, the one
in flame you stand in, no one knowing the difference,
and if they saw anything at all they would see just a tree
and not look twice.
From Three Cormorants:
they weren’t there yesterday
and there’s no guarantee
they’ll be there tomorrow.
This could be how the gods
might mean, ready for whatever,
marking the unknown,
assuming the blessed.
From The Empty Well:
You turn, want to leave
this place with no sides, an empty well
a stone keeps falling down.
Then I fell asleep. And the tone of the poems set the mood of my mid-afternoon nap dream:
I was driving a public jeepney inside the University of the Philippines - Diliman campus, to take my former coworker at Quezon City Hall to her class one bright morning. Somehow, she was a student again of the university where she graduated from more than a decade earlier - and where I dropped out from almost three decades ago. But I took a detour in the dream to give chase to another vehicle, for a reason I could no longer recall. She ended up late for her class. I apologized, she said it's okay, and decided to just attend the next.
I don't know why exactly I dreamed about her. But I believe that seeing her post on Facebook before I slept, with a photo of her and her grandmother shoulder-to-shoulder, and with an announcement of the latter's recent passing, must have been a factor. We're not even close friends - more so after I resigned from city hall December of 2013. But I do remember giving her a birthday or Christmas present: a stuffed toy figure of my friend who gained fame as a TV personality and comedian of the absurd. (That was among the merchandise he sold with his wife, before his fatal accident when the public bus he was riding plummeted down a mountain slope February of 2014.)
Anyway, I am delighted to have discovered the poems of Brian Swann. I believe that's all I wanted to say.
