Brigadoon
Jeff Hoffman
Stumble through the woods to find the beauty
of the glen at last: the mist just so;
the ghost children, distanced, laughing; the tree
trunk initialed, yours forever. Below,
the bridge, its kilted troll to bid you, Welcome
back, ya bastard ye, you haven’t changed
a bit. Then through the heather until you’re home.
Soon, ill beside it all, you rearrange
statue and stone, trinket for trivet. Then out
they come, the townsmen their torches, the troll to chase
you off. The mist bakes away. Your doubt
strips bare the glen, a world erased.
Stop then — vow — to marvel at the brink:
our worlds unreached, yet pouring, endless, over us—
Jeff Hoffman’s first book of poems, Journal of American Foreign Policy, won the New Issues Poetry Prize. A former Stegner fellow at Stanford, his poems have appeared in The New Republic, Ploughshares, PN Review (UK), and elsewhere. He currently lives in Los Angeles, where he works as a screenwriter.