Poems by Brett Warren

Church

by Brett Warren

From Canary Fall 2022

Brett lives on a sandy peninsula in the Outer Lands archipelagic region of the Atlantic Ocean, where she walks in the forests and edge habitats of the Wequaquet Lake watershed. Her house is surrounded by pitch pine and black oak trees—favored nighttime roosts of wild turkeys, who sometimes use the roof of her writing attic as a runway.

The church burned down long before our time.
There’s a boulder where it stood. You can sit there,
if you want, be consoled by leaning stones
of ancestors, their troubles over, or wait

for skunks to come out and forage for grubs
at dusk. Once I saw a woman lying on her back
in the afternoon grass, sobbing. This morning
we walk the cemetery road, two rutted tracks

of sand and shells of broken clams. We stop
to admire an impressive pile of scat—
its grainy texture, its russet color. The scat says
coyote, here, first light. You wonder aloud

about the embedded kernels, pale as hazelnuts
or small planets. I guess acorns, shrug, say omnivores.
We always love to hear the coyotes at night.
To be awakened. You say, I’m glad they’re here

where they can’t be shot. You mean the cemetery—
haven for the dead, the broken open, the alive alive.

© Brett Warren

Mouse Log

by Brett Warren

From Canary Fall 2022

Scavenging firewood between storms, we find a pile
of unsplit oak the town left behind. The chipper
will be here tomorrow. I use my foot to push aside
a log almost too rotted to take, but roll it down a slope
toward our truck anyway, until I see a white-footed mouse
tucked into one of its grooves, black eyes all pupil
as she tries to decide whether to jump or stay.
She backs in further, out of sight. So we lift this trunk
like a treasure, nestle it like fine sculpture in a corner
of the truck bed. At home, we unload the mouse log,
carry it like medics bearing a stretcher, set it down
between two arbor vitae, a name that means tree of life,
a kind of tree we have in our yard, but also a structure
we carry in our cerebellum, a word that means little brain.
We have mice in our walls. No one can tell us
how to get them out alive before closing up the holes.
When I can’t sleep, I think of the mouse in her wooden burrow,
the arbor vitae deep within her cerebellum. When she dies,
I hope she falls to weather, to age, to tooth or claw.
Not poison, not a trap, not the chipper’s screaming maw.

© Brett Warren

Tapestry

by Brett Warren

From Canary Spring 2024

The fawn’s head glows, sunlit in its bed
of fallen needles and leaves. The eyes

are gone. We pause to inspect it. Newborn,
maybe stillborn, little skull I could cradle

in my palm, stroke the damp fur with my thumb.
Instead, I find a stick and roll it off the trail.

Maggots veil the underside, this death already
swarming with life. A fawn is treasure, windfall,

found energy in the season of pups in dens,
when the odds are against new life, and endings

are everywhere, waiting. We know all this,
even believe in its rightness. And yet. This small

death. The milk-heavy doe, carrying her losses
as we carry ours, threading among the trees.