De Amerikaanse dichter en vertaler James Brasfield werd geboren op 19 januari 1952 in Savannah, Georgia. Hij studeerde af aan Armstrong State College en Columbia University, met een MFA. Zijn werk is verschenen in AGNI, Chicago Review, Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, The Iowa Review, New Orleans Review, Poetry Wales, The Seattle Review en The Southern Review. Hij was van 1993 tot 1994 een Fulbright Scholar aan de Nationale Universiteit Kiev-Mohyla Academie, Oekraïne en keerde later terug naar Oekraïne om les te geven aan de Yuri Fedkovych State University in 1999. Hij gaf les aan de Western Carolina University en was gasthoogleraar aan de University of Memphis in 2008 tot 2009. Brasfield geeft momenteel les aan de sectie Engels aan de Pennsylvania State University.
Early Afternoon, Having Just Left the Chapel of San Francesco
Radiant the delayed calmness,
—Do you feel it, I said. —Yes, you said,
of what only each can know,
kernel of radiance, the globo terrestre
of a water drop, not the passing adaptations
of canonical light, but seconds stilled—
our hearts beating through the moments—centuries
of the next tick of a watch relieved,
a world enough in time to imagine
Piero walk to work across cobblestones
toward a completion, his close attention
to sunlight passing through shadows
owned by the sharp angles of buildings,
sunrays warming what they touch.
Piero, first a painter, is not a monk.
He will make what welcomes light
a source of light: slow the day
he will add lucent black wings
to white feathers of the magpie
ever alight on a roof-edge.
I found a feather on a stone, feather I thought
from the angel’s wing, that arc of light
held aloft in descent, shared with us
and Constantine in his dream.
I think of a white egret returning home near
the high creek, through unwavering
evening light, to sleep, sleep at Sansepolcro,
where we were headed in a rental car.
Expleasure
How time slowed when any thought
or apprehension of the next instant
vanished (no obligation, then or later),
how in that long moment, all at once,
yet without surprise, how what was close
was present in a sudden suspense,
as such things rarely exist
as they did then, each apart from all,
seen as it might be truly,
and gave way to a pleasure
that had long been missing,
to expleasure, as if I were akin
to the smallest things—ribs
of a leaf, penny on a dresser—
of a saving stillness, doubtless
always here, just beyond
the scrim of what calls us
from that silent astonishment,
the more so since the feeling
dissolves with its presence of detail
merging with a distant seeing,
as when I walk through a room
and nothing is equal there to the calm
from the simply seen.
