Brandon conversation

Headed down to Goodro Lumber at 4:27pm unaware
they close at 4:30, just enough time
to grab a bag of salt for the front steps

for our office down the road. The man behind
the counter, bald, squat, reading glasses
hanging from a string around his neck—

    Hard to speak when a song or dream pursues you:
    I had to go into the river to follow the night.
    I had to go into the river to follow the night.

The man said, “Why is there, why did they make it
so there’s a dotted line around the proof of purchase
on a bag of salt, so you can cut it out and have the salt

pour out from there?” I ventured a guess, “Maybe
you save up enough and they’ll send
you a jacket like Marlboro used to.”

A buzzing from the boys’ chat in which Ed says
“Everything changed after riding Tron,
Something came back with me from the grid.”

The front steps have been salted. The crossbars,
X’s supporting the poles on the high voltage lines
run miles over fields of mostly untouched snow.

Was that car flashing its lights or bouncing over
a bit of uneven road? They were right, a cop
hiding out in the pull off by the White Gorilla.

John Martyn sings, “And suddenly, I’m not the same
little boy.” A group of snowmobiles pulls out
of the Leicester gas station, and I should have said before

underthose high powerlines, the only trails
not far from the road were from snowmobiles
or maybe skiers, after. But I want to be a young buck

again, watching a friend’s older brother,
had to have been ‘96, build his own levels
on a PC for DOOM. Up to that moment

I’d otherwise thought God made videogames
and TV shows, not some kid fooling around
on his father’s hand‐me‐down Gateway 2000.

Or setting up on the pool table in the basement
and cutting up a box on which to impersonate
the expressionist paintings I’d seen

at the Worcester Museum of Art, the wild
strokes of Franz Kline, I believe it was the black
and white piece, Spectre. For the first time, meaning

had an ineffable relation to form for me…
the painting articulated the footings of a dancer
without the figure in simultation. I wanted that

but got in trouble for cutting into the pool
table’s felt when making paintings my dad threw out,
might have been a burst waterpipe ruined them

anyway. It’s hard to say but I’m not the same either,
this Jeep in front of me seems to want us all
to hit a red, me and that other Jeep ran the yellow

pretty clean. The Brandon Library is beautiful
in its renovation, electric candles in its new windows,
two over two lights. John Martyn goes on to sing,

“Cos I can’t see the people that I meet
All I see is her.” It’s getting darker now
so that the Ford Explorer without its lights on

at 5:22 seems wrong. Snow sifted between
the grey trees on the low‐lying mountains,
but I’m thrown off course, John, I never saw

the absent ones, it was just terror in the gut,
the one orange‐stalked bush outside our driveway,
is it burning, is anyone home?

                                       Recorded 2/11/25

—

from VEEDON FLEECE–published by Press Brake

Buy the book here

—

Ben Pease is the author of the poetry collection
Chateau Wichman: A Blockbuster in Verse (Big Lucks Books),
Furniture in Space (factory hollow press), and VEEDON FLEECE
(Press Brake), a chapbook that explores the artist’s life
through the titular Van Morrison album, Walt Whitman, and
the author’s own juvenilia. His poems have appeared in
American Poetry Review, Poetry Northwest, jubilat, Farewell
Transmission, and 7×7, among others. He is the co-founder
of the Ruth Stone House, Communication Coordinator at Otter
Creek Engineering, and book designer for various enterprises.
He lives in Brandon, VT with his wife, Bianca Stone, and their
daughter, Odette.