John Bradley


Adoration of the Brain Cascade


I mentally arranged your particles into a physician 
carrying an oboe case made of mink fur.  I hadn’t 
thought Wednesday morning could be so dangerous.  

Sometimes I have no choice but to learn 
the five ways to erase the guy in the hedge 
maze.  Causing me to fall into non-Euclidian 

bodily functions.  Causing me to fall in love 
with a square-tipped tongue dipping into a square-
shaped pond.  Causing Clara to say: And so 

a stillness was born, taller than I can remember.  
What excites me excites the tip of the roots 
in the garden outside Eden.  About 100 miles

outside Santa Fe, where you dream the future 
flooding belly after belly.  I know because 
an unknown passive someone quietly reads 

your every consummation.  Even the bullet 
wounds where you and I have to go.   Clara 
made words stretch and float between

lowly non-Clara words.  A way of sheltering 
hands, clouds afraid of chartreuse-painted ice.  
When the corpse will be examined—and 

it must be examined—call the filmmaker.  
I’ll be wearing the flirtatious rubber boots,  
Clara smoking a thick rubber cigar.



Behind the Sumac


I can smell the Commander’s cigar; I can hear him behind the sumac telling his followers, Now 
is the time to cleanse thy flesh with ash and honey, fever rag and lye.

A moth can be killed a thousand times, but those who disappear into a blue chair cannot be 
tracked.

In truth, a passing plumber could replicate you or me from parts of furniture found in the street, 
a rhino hide stolen from the rectory, a stinging jellyfish on a cracked dinner plate. 

Take care how you talk to your spine, when you say, Let the street be made of burned cars, 
ruptured vowels, pieces of marble statuary.

Julius Caesar, you who could spend days wandering inside a heron’s egg, if you were with us 
now, you would rent the river until it flies in four directions.

I have discovered how ants travel day and night through the cracks in our foreheads, telling us, 
The bored shall devour their own chimney and spit out the flue.

We know the enemy has pillaged our language with a plastic fork, poisoned our pituitary with a 
McDonald’s coffee cup.

I am armed only with history, which I keep beside me in a silver amphora, another source of 
tremors in the dining room.

All the unheard words, covered with thick fur (black and brown), they turn the wheel that propels 
the planet that swirls the brain just so.  

Yes, I often look upon the sway of trees, sometimes for hours, and observe how they obey each 
command of the lawyers that represent the moon.

I have discovered how a subcranial song, dipped into liquified metadata, denudes those who keep 
their tongue wrapped in black satin.

I’ve seen 65,000 people hold lightning in the throat, and I still see the futureless faces, watch 
them pulse and pull apart.

I can smell the Commander’s cigar; I can hear him, behind the sumac telling his followers, 
Now is the time to break thy neighbor’s cradle and sharpen the staves. 

Thirteen Codicils to My Bequest Leaving My Entire Literary Estate to the Ray Bradbury Interstellar Library Now Under Construction on Mars


1. Ignore the incessant chatter from the faulty computer chip implanted in the stuffed crow’s head that keeps repeating: The circle without a navel is not a circle not a circle not a circle.

2. Please don’t disturb the settings on my sarcophagus; they control the foundry furnaces melting fluegelhorns back into maple syrup and mercury.

3. Install this sign in the Thomas Merton Meditation Room: Contemplating a pear tree sprouting from one’s head may lead to dizziness, loss of memory, and a pear tree sprouting from one’s head.

4. Make an ocelot from my ossuary; let it roam each room of Karen Dalton’s Last Resort, melting in the febrile rain.

5. Don’t tell the Poetry Police, but behind the library someone will sell you a capsule of liquified light that, when swallowed, allows you to step into the center of any tree, no matter how exhausted or excited the wood.

6. It’s true. By the time they removed every moth pupa from my aura, nothing was left.

7. Tell the lawyers: Anyone can be brought to silence by the sight of an inflamed crab on a white china plate singing “The Night Has a Thousand Eyes.”

8. Very soon after the alien is born beneath the greenhouse, you too will be burying all the silverware and eating your bowl of green pea soup with a baby’s shoe.

9. Removing the supporting arch in my cranium, the taxidermist will no doubt notice how my skull had been patched many times with scraps from a tractor tire, tin from a hammer dulcimer once owned by Herman Melville, and shredded copies of Collectible Spoons of the Third Reich.

10. In my underground bunker, avoid the figure bent over a large tub, stirring the magenta pajamas with a long pole, poking the drowning fabric until it surrenders the day’s nuclear code.

11. Don’t be alarmed when you hear how everyone in the emergency room saw, there, on the roof of my mouth, the painting of the last supper at a gas station glowing in the desert night, frantic vowels fluttering round the neon moon.

12. Should you ignore the warning—May produce prolonged periods of hypersomnia—and find yourself slipping under the seat cushion of the Rod McKuen Memorial Chair while reading a Bradley poem from the archives, press the red panic button on the armrest.

13. That death mask of George Orwell I found at a yard sale, it won’t scare away solar termites or the F.B.I.



Caesar Ordered Every Cloud


And so in the narrowest part of the year, Caesar ordered every cloud must carry several million goat bladders of water from the Ganges. And an even-tempered axe that will never strike anyone with a plum stone caught in the throat. For plums don’t know how to deal with us.

*

Let us encase this vast domain with unbreakable glass that breathes as we breathe but never leaves any trace of our droppings, Caesar told his mechanical crow. And henceforth we shall, each of us, from elephant rider to snail driver, be connected to each other by a rope cinched at the waist.

*
[Text missing] for inside the body of Caesar, noted Caesar, there are many rooms, with a mirror, a goblet, and a coffin with paddles and oars. The river, he explained, we cannot see it, but the river carries us under mountains and through the moon’s most inner membrane. But be glad you are not a piston in the factory extracting water from otter bone and owl tuft.

*

On a Monday afternoon, Caesar ordered that a hole be drilled into the top of every skull, so that the sky might commingle with the body, unto the smallest of the bones in the toes, and thus guide the wandering, telling them: As I reside even in your crowded mouth, your skeletal words shall go forth clothed in oblivion.

*

Caesar chewed on a pine cone and then called for his wisest advisor from his adviser stable. Remove your bulletproof boot and bulletproof sock, said Caesar. Then, without any garlic salt or mustard, Caesar bit his wise advisor’s right foot and ate most of it, after which Caesar burped. Feeling much calmer, Caesar said, Do not bother to borrow my crown after I leave, for it will pinch and pitch and lead to spinal hallucinations.

*

Carried to [Text erased], Caesar fell out of his body and napped.

Electronic Vertigo with English Subtitles


Because under hypnosis I surgically removed your third thumb.
As a result, you no longer appear blurry in the winter.
I had to prove to the survivors that to gaze at a meteor in bare feet would turn your hair silver.
I can’t compete with the pulsing 600-year-old child that poured through your eyes.
Because under hypnosis I said, So many hotel rooms overtaken by lava.
It’s true, the smell of fresh pine reminds me of a Roman oven.
Those earth voices trapped inside a buried violin.
Because under hypnosis you took me, once again, to northern Rhode Island.
When have I ever, when have you ever.  Made the static reeling around you stop.  
Birds from the greenhouse must be dehydrated, ground, scooped, sifted, seeded.
I need a transpersonal system of retrieval, as in: Removing the sky from the eye of the fox.
In the center of the circle, you can only quote Rumi to the F.B.I.: O, to be a shaved Brussels sprout, soaking in champagne.
While yet another fast-talking time machine appears in a Nebraska dumpster.
Because someone in a tree, under hypnosis, was reading my tread.  Before I could.

Elderberry Zinc


One Thursday, Garbage lifted the lid of our garbage bin, stepped inside, and quietly closed the lid. Once inside, Garbage drew on the wall a hairy behemoth eating a tasty tree, a mound of ripe waste rising behind it. Gorgeous, accidental, consensual waste. From elderberry to zinc. Blurring at the edges.

*

A flamingo feather traverses the sky,
but the Tower of Trash—each day
ever higher, ever mightier—can never
breach the heavens, writes Thomas
Merton, a basket of trash near his side.

*

A car speeds by and garbage wings out the window for the wind to take wherever the wind believes garbage most needed. When no one is looking, I pick up the tired trash and drop it in the garbage bin where Garbage resides. Garbage pretends I don’t disturb Garbage as I deposit the new garbage on top of Garbage. As if I can’t see Garbage meditating on the future of garbage. As if I can’t see the future Garbage meditating this moment on a mound of garbage.

*

On a low rise at the Abbey of Gethsemani,
Merton built his hermitage with solitude
and blab, each wall a page bearing ink-
besotted words—swollen, swelling.

*

Not that you’ve asked, but before garbage was Garbage, Garbage was a blanket in the garage where two rodents died, leaving their desiccated corpses to whoever would disturb the slumbering blanket. Garbage was once freshly ground coffee that couldn’t sleep. A roofing nail that couldn’t stay awake. A smoke detector that could read the tattered smoke that escapes each time you open your mouth.

*

Waltz with me, my dear placebo, says Garbage.
And so, we eat and sleep, waltz and void.




John Bradley's most recent book is Hotel Montparnasse: Letters to Cesar Vallejo, a verse-novel. He is a poetry editor for Cider Press Review.

 
 

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