In June 2005, Brownderville published his first book, Deep Down in the Delta, which features his poetry along with a selection of the folktales he gathered in his home region during the years 1999-2002. His work has been published by The Oxford American, The Eclectic Muse, Edge City Review, The Neovictorian/Cochlea, Romantics Quarterly, The Society for the Study of Southern Literature, and Magnolia Quarterly.

In 2004, Brownderville publicized the assemblage sculpture of Sister Law, the late primitive folk artist and Pentecostal preacher of Patterson, Arkansas, and saw to it that a large collection of her artworks was accepted and housed by Ouachita Baptist University of Arkadelphia, Arkansas. In 2005, Brownderville received an award from the Arkansas Press Association for a piece he published in the Woodruff County MONITOR about Law’s contribution to Southern art and culture. In 2002, as editor of a small weekly newspaper, Brownderville played a leading role in a successful local campaign to prevent the diking and draining of the lower White and Cache rivers of his native Delta countryside. Two years later, the ivory-billed woodpecker, previously thought to be extinct, was discovered soaring above Cache River and Bayou DeView, about a mile from which the poet grew up and his parents’ home remains.

Brownderville has read his poems and delivered lectures on poetry at several colleges, universities, and high schools, and has also performed in blues bands as a singer and French harp player from Arkansas to Carolina. He is currently pursuing a graduate degree in English at Ole Miss. Copies of his book can be purchased at his website, www.gregbrownderville.com.



The Poem of Poems

A boy passes ghost-like through a curtain of weeping willow.
In rainbow-stained apparel, birds are singing a cappella.
Suddenly I sense it, in the birds and in the child: 
The world is a poem growing wild.

A dewdrop on a blade of grass soon slips from where it clung
Like a perfect word that gathers on the tip of a poet's tongue.
And men are merely characters to love and be defiled.
God is a poem growing wild.



Hurt with Hunger

The cosmic goddess put this day on paper.
Now we must live the tragedy: skyscraper
Volcanoes vomit, Samson's hair is shorn.
Colder to Hamlet's prayer than William Shakespeare,
She sings the darkness down, and I will mourn,
Waking to find the world battered and torn;

Yet will make meat of rubbish, drink the rain,
If that is what it takes to wake again.
Though every blessed thing should go asunder,
There is raw life to live for, deep in pain.
How could I hate my fate? I hurt with hunger
For the snake-tongue whip wielded by the thunder.

Confused word-slingers have repudiated
The joy of song as if it were outdated.
They grope for a new way to mope or, what
Is worse, rehash the Twenties with a jaded
Laziness. Some are satisfied to dot
The i and cross the t in Eliot.

I am a songbird in the city, blest
With ruthless wonder. In my holy nest,
Rude, foreign scraps are woven into shape.
Cruel Life, too enchanting to resist,
Savage me, and you'll leave without a scrape.
I am impossible for you to rape.



Never

And there he stood, undressing Sherry Anne.
It seemed immensely strange to him (despite
His lonely line of work) that, of all men,
He found himself alone with her this night.
Remembering her body grape-skin tight,
He channeled Eden through his hands to give
Her flesh an afterglow of primal Eve.

Night blacked his eyes, and slowly transferred ten
Years from her face to his. At five, he shook
The spring and refill from a ball-point pen.
Sawing the barrel with his knife, he took
An inch out, painted it flesh-toned, and stuck
It in a lump of clay he hoped would answer
For the left side of her nose, lost to cancer.

While nothing could restore her radiance,
Her husband and the kids would be impressed
To see the change wrought in her countenance.
The artist thought, "Whoever would have guessed?
A nose-hole made from an ink pen." He pressed
The clay around it till the shape was set,
And cried as he performed her last toilette.

At sunup, as he headed home--the black
Road in the mirror slithering loosely away,
Writing an S in the grass like a snake--
He thought about the past, about a day
When Sherry Anne was in his Chevrolet
At Christmastime. He didn't know back then,
But life would never be that good again. 



Some Kind of a Good-By

What I was really hanging around for, I was trying to feel some kind of a good-by. I mean I've left schools and places I didn't even know I was leaving them. I hate that. I don't care if it's a sad good-by or a bad good-by, but when I leave a place I like to know I'm leaving it. If you don't, you feel even worse. -- From The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger

... los ultimos versos que yo le escribo. --From Puedo Escribir, by Pablo Neruda

     We waded into a sea of lespedeza
And made a careless pallet of our clothes.
Like two pasts melting into one amnesia,
We merged and mixed the colors of our souls.

     She bit my lip, she loved me violently.
Her nails dug in
And slashed my back, graphing her ecstasy
On my skin.
I was breathing her inebriating air
For the last time right then and there.

     I talk to you about you now as if you were another
Because I cannot find her in your eyes, the you who were my lover.

     Sweetheart, I cherished every wound
You left on my back, blood-cocooned.
Aided by the burning in the shower and the itching
Where torn skin fibers were re-stitching,
I pretended your fierce hands were on me still,
And tried to feel
Some kind of a good-by.

     The deepest cut stayed with me quite a while,
The mark as well as a faint feeling,
Before it made a mockery of healing.
In the end a slight discoloration,
Pinkish and thin,
One morning in the mirror it was gone.

Had I watched it all night long,
I would have witnessed the evaporation,
The very whitening of the skin.
But the final vanishing of the beloved
Never happens when you're thinking of it.
Like a rare, dwindling patch of Southern snow
That disappears with no one there to see,
It left me secretly,
The last trace of your touch my flesh will ever know.



Flesh to Marble, Marble to Flesh

The flesh, we're told, is at war with the Spirit.
Whose flesh? It galls me every time I hear it.
Send Paul back down Damascus road and give
His eyes to my blind friend, who loves to live.

We eat the flesh of Christ because it's good.
And why did Krishna charm the sacred wood
At Vrindavan with loving melodies, 
Compelling wives to slip from their cold pillows
Into the mystery mid the bird-bright willows?
Aswirl with color in the blissful breeze,  
Their lovely god would play his flute and dance
Away the night in perfect innocence,
Brushing bodies with women who had made
An inner candle ceremony of
Wild urge and the red-raging blaze of love.
Abandoned on their knees, the rest made dew
With pestling hips in the moon-milky glade.
Tonight, from Satan's bed, they hear the dry,
Praise-weary tongue of Lazarus jar the sky.
"Samson, Samson, are you in hell?" he screams.
"Please, send Delilah. I can sneak her through.  
I'm thirsty for a lover, one vile drop."
So tragic, heaven and hell, such sad extremes.

Love comes in at the eye, we've heard, but rob
A noble soul of sight and he will find
Another way. Blindness need never bind,
Nor sight, or why does Jesus heal the blind?
You say he never heals? I've shared a pew
With passionate, persuasive country folks
Who thought a good, full-throated prayer unchokes
The source at some invisible Siloam.
They found that flesh is worth the praying through.

I had a dream last night that might come true.
My blind companion, sojourning in Rome,
Had somehow stumbled into St. Teresa
In Ecstasy. His fingers on her face,
The marble turned to flesh and stood, dismissing
His fear with one soft touch. While they were kissing,
As lightning foretells dawn, sight flickered twice
And he was healed. Imagine paradise
Awaiting--faces, paintings, gleaming day;
And yet he closed his eyes to kiss and pray.