GAYLORD BREWER, "LATE IN THE NARRATIVE" (Issue 15)

LATE IN THE NARRATIVE

The houses risen
from rubble a generation
gone, solid stone
and good roofs. The road

widened and paved.
The war ended a lifetime ago,
villain vanquished
in body, if not memory.

Ages since, lovers met
and parted, or met
and remained.
The old man’s dead,

slumped over his plow,
and the cattle auctioned.
The children gone,
too, grown now

and happily escaped
to the city and its sequels.
The view’s still nice,
but you’re thirty years

too late, or maybe a thousand,
depending on the edit.
Anyway, face history—
you’re a bit part,

on the end of the couch,
in the shade of the chapel,
a clever, irrelevant
remark here or there,

a minor scene or two
unlikely to survive revision.

ABOUT THE POET

Gaylord Brewer is a professor at Middle Tennessee State University, where he founded and for more than 20 years edited the journal Poems & Plays. His most recent book is the cookbook-memoir The Poet’s Guide to Food, Drink, & Desire (Stephen F. Austin, 2015). His tenth collection of poetry, The Feral Condition, will be published by Negative Capability Press in 2018.

ABOUT THE SOUND OF SUGAR

We’ve loved reading the work that we’ve published (clearly), so now we want an opportunity to better hear our contributors. We will feature an audio recording of a poem from one of our seven issues, read by the poet and updated every couple of weeks. This an open invitation to all contributors from any of our issues, we were delighted to print your work, now we’re eager to hear it.