Poem of the Week | April 21, 2025

“Chariot, Swinging Low” by J. Scott Brownlee is our Poem of the Week.

J. Scott Brownlee is a poet from Llano, Texas, and a former Writers in the Public Schools Fellow at NYU. He is the author of the chapbooks Highway or Belief, Ascension, and On the Occasion of the Last Old Camp Meeting in Llano County. Honors for these collections include the 2013 Button Poetry Prize, 2014 Robert Phillips Poetry Prize, and 2015 Tree Light Books Prize. His first full-length collection, Requiem for Used Ignition Cap, was selected by C. Dale Young as the winner of the 2015 Orison Poetry Prize. It also won the 2016 Best First Book of Poetry Award from the Texas Institute of Letters. His second full-length collection, What Flesh Inherits, will be published in 2026 by Texas Review Press.
 

Chariot, Swinging Low

Given the shock of electrified skin, I feel match-lit
by each summer storm. Seeing the glow in the thunder
-clouds going green at their center, I grow incandescent
looking out the window as the hail approaches. What mirage
meets my gaze in the glass? Am I split in two here? Is a third me

witness? I can’t reckon where sky and horizon mesh themselves
into a funnel, but it must be out there. My wind chime
does its best impression of Jesus with the moneychangers
—or else fills with the spirit of some rapt demon damaged
back to angel from the shock of its spine snapped
where white wings exit. Can that music move me enough

to believe it? I think of pastors at daises & folding chairs
for penitents, VFW Hall time with Pentecostals when
my friend & I got permission to get up & run barefoot—
set free to the river halfway through a shouted sermon
about Revelation. Our cries might have been tongues
the elect set alight with unspeakable phrases for Yahweh’s favor.

We were young & knew it. Faith could be dismantled.
We transfigured to minnows as we sent sand through fingers
with fish scales sticking until we believed our first breaths
pulsed through pink gills & the deep water’s work. Praise
the smallest noticed by the meekest of us, those pill bugs
we worshipped as our true Lazari in their uncoiling

& reanimation. What is more remarkable? I ask the storm
as it unfurls, shuddering the wood eaves until they are shrieking.
To realize Who created the world or the What, the Source
Code, that drives it? Semantics aren’t a stand-in for wind’s
fierce right hand scratching at the window a Morse code
of liquid. Look how fracture gives way to a prism’s

witness: water streaking the glass in a hundred colors
which are all clear, or blue, or a sudden blackness
—how the petrichor wave burns away fine carbon
from the fire’s ashes in the nearby pasture with a sudden cleansing
that is revelation. Somehow a caterpillar made it inside
& is inching himself up to me in a spiral across the wood trim

with a patience beyond the human, & above him a spider
has spun geometric silk catching her own brief, ecstatic
rainbow. I have been both creator & the created & prefer
to these roles the wet pane between them where the water gathers.
This must be the kingdom Pentecostals promised—blurry
imperfect vision of a blessing through flesh I don’t often stay

still long enough to notice. Even so, the storm clears. The sun
clings to the white hairs on my wrist: so much so they loop into
& out of themselves, ladder rungs for a black flea hanging on
to a Jacob’s Ladder only she believes in. She goes higher,
climbing, & I’m left to watch her leap up, disappearing—
wondering why I dream about resurrection & not what she teaches.

Author’s Note

I was raised in rural Texas and grew up surrounded by the language, imagery, and storytelling of evangelical Christianity, and for a good portion of my childhood I was passionately religious, with a best friend who at one point trained to be a Pentecostal minister. I really did spend time in the VFW hall in this poem as a child, and I really did leave before the sermon was finished.

Years later I was also “saved,” as Baptists call it, on more than one occasion, which I think was due to the intensity of the religious language I encountered and the earnestness believers brought to conversations of belief and conversion. I eventually spent years counterpointing my belief with New Testament scholarship that I read to contextualize where the language and narratives I grew up with were located historically, and I was profoundly changed in the process. Along the way, I unlearned some of the spiritual fundamentals I grew up with—replacing them with a newfound awe for the everyday, a deep appreciation for what the natural world teaches through the plants and animals it assembles, and the revelatory power of good old-fashioned mystery.

You don’t have to know exactly where you’re going to arrive there, eventually, is a phrase that likely guides this poem. By not setting out with an endgame in mind, it meanders and drifts until a flea, of all things/creatures, delivers a powerful and miraculous lesson about what is right in front of us to marvel at.