Staining the Day
Black butterfly drawn by my white paint
Flutters, flutters, her movements bred
To beat the birds, to cross the fields
Why does she want my paint?
I wave her away
Is it the unnatural white?
The sweet chemical smell?
What does she see, this butterfly?
What is it this creature of flowers smells?
I wave my brush at her
Busy in my barn painting
Busy to get done and on
She waves
She flutters
She goes back to flowers
I go back to spattering
The newspapers beneath my feet
With fine rains of drops
Hoping to write some
Hoping past this work
She comes back
The white, the smell
I don’t know
Yet she dives, summersaults in
Black in a pool of chemical white
Hopelessly bound and lost
In the tar in the smell
Only her legs free
I flick her out onto the newspaper
A poor, folded thing herself
Only her legs and head
Anything but white
Gone
Dead
Only a question of time
And it’s up to me
To turn away
Or stop the suffering
I stomp, hard
Onto the grotesque origami
A bit of pink spills out
Flower or brains or blood
Whatever it is
It stains the paint
It stains the paper
It stains the day
98 Pages
$20
isbn 1-59661-051-4
David Breeden earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His Ph.D. is from the University of Southern Mississippi. He has published five books of poetry and three novels. He taught writing and literature at Schreiner University but is currently attending the seminary in Chicago, studying to become a Unitarian-Universalist minister. His work has appeared in Mississippi Review, Poet Lore, Mid-American Review, The Quarterly, North Atlantic Review, The Literary Review, and Wormwood Review.
David Breeden says he writes “when no one is looking,” and no one has such sharp eyes. Searching for “Wittgenstein,” he finds enough, “Enough to say / there’s nothing here but a brisk wandering.” But what wandering. A black butterfly drawn to death in white paint becomes a moment “To turn away / Or stop the suffering,” and what happens in the moment “stains the paint / It stains the paper / It stains the day.” Anything but black and white, these poems are a brisk wandering attentive to the music “of language as we use it.” Unwilling to settle into comfortable assent, they do not turn away. “That old freak Emily / Dickinson had it right…,” and Breeden has been paying attention. “We all glow / For awhile,” but these poems burn. They leave a mark. And their fire sheds considerable light on “Enough and everything else.” Read them for the light. Read them for the music. Read them. —Steven Schroeder, Virtual Artists Collective
Reading David Breeden’s poetry is like having a discussion with the guy sitting next to you in a neighborhood beer bar. Because, more often than not, he writes about everyday life in what seem to be everyday words if you read straight through. But if you linger and start taking the poems apart, well…the language is anything but everyday. Of course, if the guy sitting next to you is as sharp as a straight razor, as witty as a Robin Williams ad lib, and as eloquent as an Everett Dirksen filibuster, he just might be David Breeden. —Charlie Newman