He appeared to be very tall, standing in a landscape with miniature models of a village, farm animals and a castle. “I’ll hurry over first,” he explained, “so I can let the drawbridge down and open the big front doors for you.” He welcomed his visitors into a room of doll-house chairs he would move into place with a seemingly massive hand. “Here’s one little chair for one of you,” he began with a soft and gentle voice. That was 1950s black-and-white TV and my four-year-old self believed completely in the Friendly Giant. “Here’s a bigger chair for two more to curl up in,” he continued, then played his recorder and read stories to Rusty the Rooster, Jerome the Giraffe and to me. “And for someone who likes to rock, a rocking chair in the middle,” which was always my favorite spot. If your own father was an isle of ice that boiled beneath, Friendly’s invitation was a warm welcome to a safe place. “Are you ready?” he said with a smile. “Here’s my castle.”
Copyright 2022 by Brian Dean Powers
Published in the Fall 2022 issue of Bramble
Photo from the Wisconsin Public Television archives
I cannot see it, but I hear its call,
that one persistent bird outside my home
whose sounding seems between a song and squawk.
Perhaps it sees our summer sweetness fade
and knows that winter’s bitter bite is near.
Perhaps it loves the sunlight in the leaves,
this summer and these leaves whose lives are brief.
Cicadas in the treetops loudly drone:
“Don’t fail to feel this warmth, this breeze, this shade.”
The summers come and go so quickly here.
The pond is placid and the air is still.
A man stands on the bank, listening
to birds in the branches as they
sound their singular words.
Across the water, he sees
a gap in the shoreline’s verdant
trees that reveals a rooftop
away in the distance.
He watches the sky-climbing sun
halo that space between
the birches, which
lights up the pond, which
reflects the sky-climbing sun
on the still water.
When Bruegel painted cold he got it right,
He turned away from the window and his preoccupation with all that’s unknown and unknowable. His dedication to a profession rooted in reliable rules and procedures had been severely challenged by the doctor’s ghastly experiment. He settled into a large, comfortable chair before the hearth with, at a nicely calculated distance from the fire, a bottle of a particular old wine that had long dwelt unsunned in the foundations of his house. Who can really discern another’s motives, he wondered, and how is it we so quickly invent them when we have no evidence available? The fog still slept on the wing above the drowned city, where the lamps glimmered like carbuncles; and as usual he found no answers, though he deeply desired to see through the mist. Perhaps not all effects have causes, he thought, and some doubts need not be resolved, and through the muffle and smother of these fallen clouds, the procession of the town’s life was still rolling in through the great arteries with a sound as of a mighty wind. He raised his glass, resigned to replace one murk with another. In the bottle the acids were long ago resolved; the imperial dye had softened with time, as the colour grows richer in stained windows; he let all the unanswered questions dissolve and fixed his attention instead on the hearth, and so his mind, like the glow of hot autumn afternoons on hillside vineyards, was ready to be set free and to disperse the fogs of London.
Brawnie was standing at the bedroom window in the dark when Sean awoke.
A little before midnight and the beginning of the new year, Sean and Brawnie were sprawled together on the couch under their faded Packers blanket. Despite the bitter cold outside, Brawnie had shucked his shoes and socks under the coffee table.
The Body's Heated Speech 
