Brian Michael Tracy was born, raised and educated in Boston, Massachusetts. He received his BA from Stonehill College and his Master’s Degree from the Harvard University School of Design. His work has appeared most recently in Gentle Strength Quarterly, The Wallace Stevens Journal (Spring 2009) and on spoken word radio programs throughout the United States and Canada including stations KPFK in Los Angeles and CIUT in Toronto. His first book of poetry Driving With Dante was published by Conflux Press in 2007. Accompanying the book was a critically acclaimed CD of poems and songs entitled Midnight Tea.

Brian has performed his poetry at a variety of venues throughout California including the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at UCLA, The Ruskin Art Club and The West Hollywood Book Fair. His web-site is www.midnightteapoetry.com


Deaf Poetry
 
Suggest to me a pasture,
an open field, unploughed,
with a gate; no fence,
just a gate
at the far end of the field.
And from that gate
you feel sound,
what you believe to be sound –
rolling under your feet
surging through your spine.
    
Then I will suggest to you
that I have seen the stallion
that roams and rattles this field
pass through that gate
unbridled, beckoning;
and if we follow
we may, from time to time
fence him, feed him
and touch him with our hands.
                                                

Astrology
 
If I could pour myself into a cradle, waiting 
or squeeze like cheese through the eye of a needle
I would lie down, fall upward
in half integers of time
rest my head on a cloud
and watch the stars live their lives.
Watch them appear and disappear,
arrange and rearrange,
asymmetrical, misaligned
and connect them as dots (look - a lion 
- and over there a hunter with two dogs!)
searching always for the face of God.
I would close my eyes and listen 
to soft cries cascade over me as they 
turned themselves into white dwarfs
the size of sugar cubes.
Put them in my tea
and watch them dissolve,
spilling over the edge of my cup
past the ends of my table,
spreading like wind, like the sound of wind
over yards and fields, forest and ocean
never falling simply bending, as light does, like prayer
when it reaches the horizon
seeking the shortest path home.
 

The Ventriloquist
 

Artificial air she called it without
a hint of irony. The hand
learns to catch it – the voice you see -
    
and soon it acquires its own face.
At first she said the whole thing feels
like a pose, an over-sized mask
    
looking back at you, awkward
to hold, difficult to manage
especially in the company of others.
    
But with years of practice, hours
of shared intonation
it slowly comes into its own –
    
an intimate echo of  yourself
to yourself; voice thrown again
and again into the wind, returning
    
reassuring, until the hand
finally catches the tongue
and the arm holding the back
    
feels just right.


Poet Brian Michael Tracy

© 2009 Brian Michael Tracy


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