Lachlan Brooks

Lachlan Brooks is a New York-based writer and actor. She holds an MA from Columbia University and a BFA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Her poetry has appeared in publications including Poet Lore, The Decadent Review, Chronogram magazine, The Year: A Crack the Spine Anthology: 2019, and Sheila-Na-Gig’s anthology Sharing This Delicate Bread.

Would If

All those shadows flatten themselves,
And the crickets’ tingling choir,
And barefoot, in pajamas, on the wet grass,
Peering back at the sunny interior,
Rectangles blooming in the night:
I know the secret of the pigeon-hearted lion
That eats its cowardice, the elephant
Who fears to tread, the mouse’s great shadow.
Firefighters search for a flame they will not find:
One of those riddles of the house.
Now I think of trinkets, notebooks, pens,
A doll left on a train, a gift vanished in the mail:
Those tender things that go walkabout
Transmogrified into life’s great mysteries.
I too go wandering of the dreamtime—
No everywhen for the fossil unfixed.
Poppies, in a dream of Provence, the always of memory.
Would that I could return, not only to the place
But to the self lost in childhood.
The jester’s privilege: the joke, the yoke,
The good deed that goes unpunished.
Would that I could with my feet in the earth
Know all the darknesses at once:
Birds tuning in their sleep and earthworms slumbering
Sound as the beast that lives without doubt.
But who can be lost who knows
They are awaited somewhere,
That a light remains on in the hall?
And what can be lost that was ever
Loved and enjoyed? For such things
Live still, have eternal life
In the round placable organ
That calls itself the heart.