Poetry by Garrett Bruner
Garrett R. Bruner is an archivist, archaeologist, and poet. The past decade, he has processed ancient Greek script related collections and serves as a site archivist for two Roman villas near Pompeii, Italy. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Offcourse, Wayfarer Magazine, Adelaide Literary Magazine, Wayne Literary Review, Shadowplay, and North Dakota Quarterly, among other publications. He lives in Austin, Texas.
Our Home Broken In
Night easing in, window wide open, chills air out the dark we’re in
about each other. Winding back inside,
the black seems deeper than ever, a dimension
we’ll never reach the depths of together.
Ghosted so, everyday diminishes the next. Feeling us out,
time turns back around, sensing no one’s home.
Some of it still hangs in the balance. Something of this
might reach you, though you’re beyond all of it.
That might be the point. Better halves gone, we’d lost the better part
of ourselves, so now, there’s less in the way
of getting across the lonely road love was meant for,
though we’d never had the heart to see to.
It took some getting used to, our return home run down,
these path’s I’ve been meant for finding you gone.
Summering off the Mainland
Come daybreak, the winds pick the pieces up where yesterday broke off.
With them, my pace quickens down to the docks.
It’s a rush, sensing what isn’t, what is, as one—undoing
the ropes, then, to let the journey onward
wash my soul over with what’s never going to happen.
There’s no looking back on the things we’ve ruined.
There’s no nothing there, anyway. In this boat, I get the drift
of anywhere looking like home, when it’s
maybe only a lighthouse, with no one there. But no matter.
I’m on the water again, my eyes closed.
It’s early, but I’m worn out all the same. My mind settles in,
my motor starts to idle, and it feels like
the wind’s paddling me on, where I had always been coming from.
I could almost sense the water’s patterns.
A million ripples spilling, surfaces swimming in and out of
the motions swirling into their ends.
I think of the loved ones back home. Of cities hollowed
and undone, souls at the end of their ropes.
I think of the night falling in the willows. What ruins will be next for
the moon to bring to light, what ruins will grow
out of the homes no longer glowing the way they used to.
Down to coals, the fire places what we can’t
put our finger on. The memories of those whose light’s gone
out for good, loved ones my heart goes out to.
On this ocean, with midnight now spread in every direction,
the water almost lapses in and out
of a song, of some emptiness coming into its own—
you can almost feel it, in your own voice,
finding that rhythm the ancients once did, filled with stillness,
no longer holding their breath for the truth.
I see it in your face, sculpted out of the moon, your smile
scooped into that luminous pearl thought lost…