Thesis
After Walter Benjamin. May we be carried back by better angels.
Recall Benjamin’s angelus novus,
broad wings blown back by winds
from paradise, the sediment of time.
Appalled, that angel still waits
for us—why—a distant constellation
of all times, revolutionary time.
Consider the radical failures
of memory of language:
the way words remain
incommensurate with matter,
our sensate organs. Consider
the ways words kill, drawing us
toward deeper furrows,
our shrapnel bodies, lovers
parted the way language
fails me now,
in faith.
It has become an act
of defiance to remember
once more We remember
to know ourselves, and others,
To tell truth from lie, to weigh
a word against memory.
It fails us now.
Here we are life laid bare,
sinews singing toward survivals:
not beauty, but precarity,
small and pale as the sheen
of the robin’s egg,
left here
—here—
to remind
us all there is
also nothing
else
Julie Phillips Brown is a poet, painter, scholar, and book artist. After earning an M.F.A and a Ph.D. at Cornell University, she served as the N.E.H. Post-Doctoral Fellow in Poetics at Emory University’s Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry. Her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Angels of the Americlypse, Columbia Poetry Review, Conjunctions (online exclusive), Contemporary Women’s Writing, Crab Orchard Review, delirious hem, Denver Quarterly, The Fight & The Fiddle, Interim, Jacket2, Mixed Messages (Manchester UP), Peregrine, Posit, Rappahannock Review, Tahoma Literary Review, Talisman, and elsewhere. She currently lives in Lexington, Virginia, where she teaches creative writing, studio art, and American literature.