Building a Boat
David Breeden

Deflate a myth for me,
or, start simpler, not
a myth, really, merely
a tall tale or heroism.

Myths don’t deflate, really,
do they, any more than
a pulse leaves a happy
arm. But got somewhere

explainable, rugged on
the floor, motives are fun,
after all, not disasters
on the beach better left un-

answered. Just a little rise,
and that visible only
at certain twists.
But there and waiting.

ISBN 1-882983-18-1
21 pages/$6

Be forewarned: These lyrics linger on long after the reading is done.
Alternately cryptic and revealing, funny and serious, coy and direct, David Breeden’s Building a Boat makes a song out of the small things that get misplaced or left behind—“the hidden apparatus/that drives the cradle in the mud”—for the poet reminds us that a part of this life must be lost so that we may make meaning of the whole.
Making meaning is indeed what these dozen wry and gossamer–voiced poems explore: how we communicate, or fail to; how we love, or fail to, in spite of it all. Certainly a trickster is at work here, tying together the shoelaces of the conventional. But beyond the satire, the images in thes poems call to us, images which turn back on themselves and hide in the folds of the human heart. They coax us out in order to inhabit the space between the seen and the unseen, that ground between what can and cannot be said.
In a minimalist style which might be called Mid-West-Prairie-Plain-Speak, Breeden makes his point only to unmake it as well, shifting irony around until his “poverty of syntax” exhausts the image, leaving us richer, staring at the face of the elegant. And it’s elegance he finds and celebrates “in the town where I was conceived,” or “daubing /at the running paint waiting/for the check to come.”
But that does not suggest these poems are easy. They are not howls or proclamations or narratives but quiet and moving lyrics which require a reader’s stillness, Read them as if you had never read poetry before.
And then, because lyric will remain, read them again.
—KIRPAL GORDON