Daniel Brown – String Poet

Upon some fallen cloud a cloud’s reflection
Is standing for a cloud. I’m standing by
Entrancedly (so goes a recollection).

Of what we know, there’s only one for knowing:
The sky in ricochet is still the sky,
It always has the latest weather showing—

Though moments prior, a sunny shower had proved
The other side of seeing once removed
(As if it needed any demonstration)

When sense suspected it was being mocked
In pond at once sun-spangled, shower-pocked,
And wavered in the face of transformation.

Daniel Brown’s Taking the Occasion (Ivan R. Dee) won the 2008 New Criterion Poetry Prize. His poems and criticism have appeared in Poetry, The New Criterion, Partisan Review, Harvard Review, and other journals, as well as in a number of anthologies, including The Pushcart Prize XI and Poetry 180 (ed. Billy Collins.) Daniel lives in Baldwin, Long Island.