Poetry uses language to take us beyond language. I feel that poetry expresses the best that the human spirit is capable of, something we can easily forget with all the horror and injustice in the world. But I think love of the beauty of this world may help us save it. And I believe poetry’s purpose is to remind us all of our true nature, and of the beauty of our world, and how we might live in a way that is more humble and appreciative and open.”

~ John Brehm

My Favorite Poem in the World

Sea of Faith

Once when I was teaching “Dover Beach”
to a class of freshmen, a young woman
raised her hand and said, “I’m confused
about this ‘Sea of Faith.’ “ “Well,” I said,
“let’s talk about it. We probably need
to talk a bit about figurative language.
What confuses you about it?”
“I mean, is it a real sea?” she asked.
“You mean, is it a real body of water
that you could point to on a map
or visit on a vacation?”
“Yes,” she said. “Is it a real sea?”
Oh Christ, I thought, is this where we are?
Next year I’ll be teaching them the alphabet
and how to sound words out.
I’ll have to teach them geography, apparently,
before we can move on to poetry.
I’ll have to teach them history, too-
a few weeks on the Dark Ages might be instructive.
“Yes,” I wanted to say, “it is.
It is a real sea. In fact it flows
right into the Sea of Ignorance
IN WHICH YOU ARE DROWNING.
Let me throw you a Rope of Salvation
before the Sharks of Desire gobble you up.
Let me hoist you back up onto this Ship of Fools
so that we might continue our search
for the Fountain of Youth. Here, take a drink
of this. It’s fresh from the River of Forgetfulness.”
But of course I didn’t say any of that.
I tried to explain in such a way
as to protect her from humiliation,
tried to explain that poets
often speak of things that don’t exist.
It was only much later that I wished
I could have answered differently,
only after I’d betrayed myself
and been betrayed that I wished
it was true, wished there really was a Sea of Faith
that you could wade out into,
dive under its blue and magic waters,
hold your breath, swim like a fish
down to the bottom, and then emerge again
able to believe in everything, faithful
and unafraid to ask even the simplest of questions,
happy to have them simply answered.”

Like John, who died a few days ago, I too was once an adjunct English teacher at a community college.

And there was also a time in my life when I felt important and strong and successful, and perhaps even slightly superior to people whom I deemed not as sophisticated as me.

And then I too was humbled by life.

This is a big part of what the poem is about, I believe, though I never explicitly confirmed this with John.

Here is what I’m sure of. The student in the poem isn’t merely posing a literary question. Whether she consciously knows it or not – and actually, she probably does know it – she is expressing a need. A need for a sea of faith. And this is something the narrator of the poem – at the time he is responding (internally and verbally) to her question — overlooks.

That is: until the season arrives in his life when he realizes the same elemental need in himself.

I think we all get there sooner or later, if we’re lucky enough.

The First Poem I Ever Heard John Read …

Was this one:

Sightlines

We’ll have to shear off the tops of those trees
if they continue to block my view
of the mountain. Not only our trees
but the neighbors’ as well. Find some
daredevil to fly a helicopter upside
down over the neighborhood
and give it a good haircut.
It’s America, people will do anything.
And my sightline is sacrosanct.
I need to see that peak floating
like Fuji, not just know it’s there.
So I can orient my immaterial
longings, my desire to transcend
earthly limitations. I can’t be
expected to pray to something
half obscured by these lesser gods
etching themselves into the evening air,
performing their fantastic
collaborations with the wind, keeping
or dropping their needles or leaves,
subject as they are to time and change.
What can they teach me about how to be?”

This one certainly needs no commentary.

Although I once did share it with someone who, incredibly, missed the irony, and took the writer’s voice seriously.

The World Has Lost a Great Poet

This I truly believe: John Brehm was a genius. The poetic voice he cultivated is direct, accessible, and … incredibly deep.

Or sometimes just quirky for the fun of it.

tomorrow

I’m going to start

living in the present“

I’m tempted to paste one or two of his funnier (generally self-deprecating) poems herein. Perhaps I will do so at the end of this newsletter.

Or not.

In speaking of John’s remarkable body of work, I feel I should stress that he was all about insight, compassion, and subtle nuances of perception that bring an added dimension to life.

bonsai shop …

what shape

would I take?“

We met because I heard him read “Sightlines” and a couple of other poems at a SUN magazine event in Portland several years ago. I walked up to him afterward and gushed and gushed about how much I loved his poems. He seemed a little reserved then, and who could blame him? I was a little over the top in my spontaneous fandom.

Then I began attending some of his “Poetry as a Spiritual Practice” salons at New Renaissance bookstore, but that wasn’t exactly how we connected as friends either. I imagined, during those sessions, that he viewed me as a bit of a pain in the ass, though I learned later that I was mistaken. Via other circumstances (long story), we had an opportunity to get to know each other, and became friends about five years ago.

His friendship was like his poetry – clear, honest, direct, caring. Surprising. Ebullient at times. Melancholy at others. Before John and I began meeting for dinners regularly, he had already been diagnosed with a particularly awful, painful, incurable form of subcutaneous lymphoma. So even on his better days, he was in a great deal of physical discomfort, but he showed up all the same, with enthusiasm, authenticity, and love.

He showed up similarly for his ongoing work. Every morning, even when he was most sick, he went to his desk, and tried to write something.

His poetry sounds so natural, one could almost imagine that it flowed from his pen with little effort. For all I know, maybe it did, at times. But I also know how dedicated he was to his writing practice.

Visitation with the Radiologist

“It’s not a good disease to have,”my doctor says.
I admire his grim honesty, I admire it
greatly. “Indolent, but it usually does progress.”
Which sounds about right for me.
Two years of misdiagnosed torment
and now this. I ask him about suicide.
He nods. “It happens,” he says.
When I tell him I’ve seriously considered it,
he says my disease would qualify me
for Death with Dignity, because
it’s incurable, though I might not meet
the six-months-to-live criteria,
just the unendurable pain part. Which will
come back after I’ve exhausted all the treatments.
“But they might make an exception
if it’s a choice between bending the rules
and blowing your brains out.”
This is my doctor, telling the truth, filters off.
I slide down into it as into a warm bath.
I want to stay here forever, ask him every question.
Maybe death is speaking through him.
What’s it like on the other side? I want to ask.
Once you’re dead, do you stop worrying
about what people think of you?
Are you allowed to intervene in the affairs
of the living, offer invisible advice now and then,
a nudge on the arm? How shall I live
with the time I have left is the real question.
I don’t ask it but let it blossom
into the room. This, this conversation,
this way of speaking, turns me
toward an answer.”

Missing My Friend

It’s hard to speak of my own feelings about John without sounding maudlin. But here are a couple of true statements:

I feel exceptionally blessed to have known him. He was an incredible friend. And when I learned the news of his passing – though I knew it was coming — and indeed, he’d initiated the Stopping Eating and Drinking process himself after (as the above poem foretold) exhausting all possible treatments and suffering what finally became unbearable physical pain – I went around for a day feeling like a part of me had been amputated.

But my grief is for my own loss. I am grateful that John is free from the cage of misery his body had become and that he is roaming free now in some vast, exhilarating space, commensurate to his extraordinary spirit and decency.

He probably wouldn’t want me to end this newsletter on a somber note. Nor would he want “Visitation with the Radiologist” to be the final poem herein.

So okay. It’s late, and maybe I’m not thinking straight right now, but I’ll end with the following outrageous poem, which he deemed “one of his best” in an offhand remark, though I wonder. As I said earlier, I think the more earnestly searching work was his trademark, and his very best work. And the following poem also belies the fact that he was actually very prolific.

It’s a hoot though. Enjoy it! John would want you to. And he’d certainly appreciate hearing you chuckle or laugh.

The Poems I Have Not Written

I’m so wildly unprolific, the poems
I have not written would reach
from here to the California coast
if you laid them end to end.

And if you stacked them up,
the poems I have not written
would sway like a silent
Tower of Babel, saying nothing

and everything in a thousand
different tongues. So moving, so
filled with and emptied of suffering,
so steeped in the music of a voice

speechless before the truth,
the poems I have not written
would break the hearts of every
woman who’s ever left me,

make them eye their husbands
with a sharp contempt and hate
themselves for turning their backs
on the very source of beauty.

The poems I have not written
would compel all other poets
to ask of God: “Why do you
let me live? I am worthless.

please strike me dead at once,
destroy my works and cleanse
the earth of all my ghastly
imperfections.” Trees would

bow their heads before the poems
I have not written. “Take me,”
they would say, “and turn me
into your pages so that I

might live forever as the ground
from which your words arise.”
The wind itself, about which
I might have written so eloquently,

praising its slick and intersecting
rivers of air, its stately calms
and furious interrogations,
its flutelike lingerings and passionate

reproofs, would divert its course
to sweep down and then pass over
the poems I have not written,
and the life I have not lived, the life

I’ve failed even to imagine,
which they so perfectly describe.”