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Category: Poetry
Jack Tumbles Jill
The Dancing Bear
The Double Helix
Talk Before Work
Poems
Elegy with Bats
Austin, Texas
They poured out from under the Congress Street Bridge
as twilight came on, first a few, then like a dam bursting
dark figures plumed through a darkening sky,
bits of ash billowing up—to thousand the air,
as Dante would say—like memories of our sister
swirling around us. She too had darkened in the last years,
so we strained to recall all of who she was,
her quick mind, her fearless missions, fierce beliefs,
teacher and human shield—before stroke stole her thought,
and she became for us not unlike the bats, half-seen,
swarming in jittery clouds. My sister, so quick
to fix a problem, fluent in Kierkegaard, Sartre,
Spanish and French, on her last visit had shrunk down
to opinion’s endless sputter of self,
wanting the last piece of toast, first cup of wine,
the talk focused on her, annoyed by a tree out front,
insulted by sunflowers next door. Stupid, stupid, stupid,
she stomped past those bright yellow petals, bonnets
brimming each round face. She hated the ones slumped
like dying Christs on their stems.
Pathetic! she said, as if anger were the last ember of self,
now without sonar, flitting, aimless, amok—
until at the end, my niece said, she was silent, her gaze fixed
on some unknown world no one else could see
any more than on that bridge, as the bats dispersed
into the deepening night, we could discern
when the last one had flown. Still, we lingered,
our eyes adjusting to shades, densities of dark,
as if we could see where a last breath, a life goes,
a soul cut loose from the body’s tether.
We stood in a crowd of others, locals and visitors
like ourselves, lingering in the summer night,
the heat of the day finally gone down with the sun,
which had, I reminded myself, not gone down at all.
It was earth that turned. And there, on the bridge,
the crowd thinning, I had to grasp the rail for balance,
as the thought filled me: the earth actually spins
day after day in space, no visible string, no pedestal,
or base to hold us, nothing but that turning,
and the weight, the sweet pull of other celestial bodies.
Heritage
Our grandfather, had he still legs, would be here
on the shore in Point Pleasant, New Jersey,
photographing footprints in dunes. Had he a mouth,
he’d make a joke and laugh. Had he ever sat with us,
he might have named the stolen horses that rode
our family across the channel, Cork to Scotland,
and then to the North, newly sober and starched.
We might know what ships and when and why to America.
Likewise, my grandmother, had she still hair to unpin
in our presence, might have softened her face,
and had she walked with us along the shore, might have
named the shells we loaded into sagging swim caps.
As to our father, had he lived into the 1960s,
into Bull Connor and police dogs, might he have rewritten
the letters disparaging all colors and faiths not his own?
Knowing our family heart, its failure and early blight,
can we at least hope that between clutch and stop, death
had time to work—death’s horses and ships, its lenses,
hairpins, its hammers and lathes, its endless waves
out there in the North Atlantic, making the water rise
and fall in place, until where we stand near shore
it snags, tumbles, throws itself like dice, like bones,
boxcars, snake eyes, chips of quahog, moon snail, tar
aswirl at our feet, tugging the sand out from under.
Two Poems
“With Affirmative Action and All”
There is not enough silence in all of Pittsburgh
to explain the quiet in that room
between the two of you, not the televised silence
of a Steelers’ riot on mute; not the stillness
of the Duquesne Incline failing to scale
Mt. Washington and rise above the grime
of steel mills. Not the muffled gasps of black boys
kicked and dunked by whites while lifeguards
look on at the Highland Park pool, summer ’31.
Not the dampened blast of the Lower Hill, razed
to pave a parking lot and build the Civic Arena,
with “no social loss” in bulldozing homes
of immigrants and blacks. Not the stifled sobs
of teen August Wilson fleeing Gladstone
when his teacher accuses him of plagiarism.
But Pittsburgh, why bully you, City of Bridges:
steely with pride, grappling with all your histories?
Why choose you, and this old horse I ride
repeatedly, haphazardly, backwards through time—
why choose you, when, in any given American
town, there is a room inside a room inside a room
where thought shapes word shapes action—shapes
memory, shapes history—where synaptic gaps
deepen, now, into fissures, into canyons.
View-Master Virtual Reality Starter Pack: Mortality Reel
1.
A canyon of memory floods
as the zip line slips: first bike,
first dance, first kiss. Broken bone.
And more: first love, wedding cake,
two kids. Soft spot pulsing
on each newborn’s crown. And you,
in the blur of greenery and river
and craggy rock, you release
every spring, pulley, or counterweight
that ever held you back.
2.
Slammed by a PAT bus. Mercy. Swift
and painless. Seven angels gasp
but you are unperturbed, descending
with a steaming non-fat chai tea latte
into the counterflow lane from the curb.
3.
One moment you leap and dance amid
a snow-topped mountain cap backdrop
and the next, without notice, you huddle
in bed, doting spouse dropping one perfect
tear upon your furrowed brow. Somewhere
afar, a sitar twangs and wails. A mysterious
virus. Rare injury. Lightning seizing
your whole and healthy spine
when you least expect it. No
choreography for grief: an entire troupe
of sequined mourners, it seems,
will fail to bring you back.
4.
Legs crossed upon a mat in the dusty outpost
you attain such enlightenment that time slows,
giving you full minutes to regard the smooth
cartridge hurtling toward your chest. It makes
of the air a gel. A web. A balloon stretched to snap.
Welcome to bullet time. You were never so much
in your life as you were around it: observing it,
remarking on it. Given this moment of dead time,
you can at last see from every given viewpoint.
5.
Overpriced vintage fountain pen
pokes through your bag, piercing
your backside. Infection follows
and you fall to sepsis, bringing credence
to claims that, daily, writing involves risk.
6.
Pitch darkness. Silence. Pure emptiness.
A familiar voice in the distance.
7.
The truth is, you don’t see it coming even there
in the wrinkled bed for the sixth—or is it seventh?—
visit that season. Your beloved covers a bowl
of canned peaches, the only taste, nowadays, that
appeals. You want to save it. You plan to eat it
later. You wait for your children to arrive
at the bedside as they always do, exhausted
and deeply happy to see you still there, still alive,
bright-eyed but—they know—shrinking. Your face
is fuller now with fluids your kidneys retain
which helps them forget that your legs, under
a stack of sheets and blankets, are nearly fleshless.
You know the doctors by name and they, you.
You know which nurses will glide in to usher
each dumbstruck family member from the room
hours after you’ve passed to the next world,
hours they’ve spent sobbing, wondering,
and pleading, your chest still rising and falling
in rhythm endlessly, it seems, as though
the only barrier between you and them
were the blissful sleep of recovery, a dream
of being lifted with love and carried home.
binding we
…originally published in 40.2 of The Florida Review.
you have declared war on our bodies, and our bodies
have fallen on each other in piles
along the gravel and the wood
and the tile of a dance floor
and these holy spaces have become our graves
and the sidewalks our pyres because we are burning up
from our no and our why and our no more
we, our breasts, our bodies,
in all their shapes and sizes are heaving
in piles on one another, breathing
the force of love enough to hold the parts of us we do not
recognize, enough to stretch the parts we hold dear
All Their Awful Particles
I am calling up the dead—the dead of my family.
I pull them out of the earth by their hair, by the fistful.
I scrutinize their bodies, green as acid, for traces of mine.
How can I stop looking at them?
At their faces?
Their bones strung together
are the beads of a necklace
I wind around my neck.
Their lives pour into me through a silver faucet
I cannot turn off. Their deaths, too—
suicide, suicide:
the familial sickness.
Surely it has congealed within me,
all their awful particles.
Surely I have been marked.
If I were the firstborn, mystical or clean
like a sheet of cotton twisting in the wind—
No.
I am a piece of slate stained,
scarred with footprints of the dead.
Are they confessing what they’ve done
to make me?
They lay their hands on me
like strips of seaweed.
When I place my mouth at my feet,
unable to speak,
I feel their malformed sadness run through my hair like a comb.
Trap Door Out of the War
While higher-ups gave the suspect a spirited drubbing, the guard stood just without, encroached upon by a nebulae of false assassins. Flailing until a handled door lay exposed, he tugged it open, entering an under-earth oasis of tropical cocktails, hula girls, a certified financial advisor with fingers pressed together in a smart-seeming way. Vibrant drinks clogged the soldier’s thoughts, leaving behind a ghost-colored mustache. Letters of endorsement reached him by certified mail and he wondered what fate he was being commended for. The hula girls drifted around with such absent-minded dexterity they often were confused for weather. The war prattled on somewhere upstairs. Wristwatches were being synchronized in far peninsulas of the earth and eighteen different people, at that very moment, were voicing displeasure over the spearfish flambé.
Two Poems
Nocturne
No one’s drowned in the boarded up well out back in a century. When I pry up the nails to let in some sky, the voices the moss maintained rise like a cloud of bats from the mouth of a cave. Hungry to be heard, as any static thing, I say to the dead you are lucky to be so permanent, so practiced at loneliness, so close, so goddamn close to journey’s end. Maybe they’ve had enough of this living forever. Maybe the mystery has never been the where or how, but why this need to be forgotten. There are many ways to scream so no one hears, and each sounds just like a child alone again in a night-heavy farmhouse, making monsters of his shadow and friends with his dead, running wild out into the dark with only a hammer and his silence; a door he can’t remember opening slamming shut behind him.
The Animal
All the cruelties are different, but there’s something familiar in carrying our children safely through the world by our teeth. In pressing an empty mouth up to the only part of us that nourishes. Sometimes, with winter at its deadest, in eating our young and starting over again in spring. It’s spring, thank god, and all we have is an open pasture of half-broken foals. A rusty cage for the chronic wild. A spindle-legged wire fence wrapped in teeth separating one neighbor from the next. When it comes down to it, son, I don’t think I’ll ever eat you. But here I am, telling you things you already know about love.
Three Poems
EMERGENCY: I FLING
open the call box— the black phone handle, barraged with red fire ants.
LONELY COUPLE
Hugh and I started a band called Lonely Couple and wrote a song by the same name. We only performed it a handful of times, in Boston, where were undergrads. I was the lead singer, I thought though, looking back, we harmonized: Wilfred Bourgeois, you’re part of us And this is a song for you So I guess I was simply a singer without an instrument. Our friends have left us all alone At this lonely table for two. Wilfred, would you marry us? It’s the hardest thing to do… I played the accordion and keyboard but we didn’t own either. Hugh strummed a guitar with a colorful strap from Guatemala. He’d make me dinner at his Kenmore Square apartment— usually spaghetti with ketchup that he thought was the same thing as tomato sauce. I didn’t have the heart to tell him there was such a thing as jarred Ragu, and besides, it actually tasted good. This was what marriage was about in the abstract, learning to love another’s innocence and quirks. He was dreamy as he played his chords, but we knew he was headed for the Peace Corps and I for grad school. Wilfred Bourgeois, my uncle, had visited us and made quite an impression, so much so that we put him in a song. He had lost his wife when she was young and never remarried. Maybe we saw him as a romantic— and that Hugh and I would love each other more if we weren’t together forever. But it occurs to me now how smart we were not to pin each other down, how we drifted on without too much drama. We populated our band with classmates, theater or music majors, who came and went. Some would later become famous for sex addiction or Wall Street banking. One of these guys had a girlfriend in cosmetology school who teased my hair with a tiny pronged comb so I could more resemble Kate Pierson from the B52s. I knew how to shake on stage, but grew stiff if someone tried to take me home after the show. I wasn’t married to Hugh and never would be, but we had loyalty and respect. I’m remembering him and all this, which I’m surely remembering at least partially wrong, because I found the lyrics of our one and only original song in Hugh’s perfect penmanship. It was folded in the laminated menu of an Indian restaurant where we apparently performed once for a samosa and dal.
ODE TO THE AMPERSAND
& what one reviewer calls the “sly female squiggle” in reviewing Julie’s new book which is full of ampersands & magic that makes me see the ampersand’s tilted hip, one leg folded up & sat upon. The Latin curvy cursive, & her French cousin, the treble clef, were my favorite symbols to draw as a kid. How easy it was then to conflate words & music. The & folded one leg atop the opposite knee, a calf draped below, a foot hooked, dangling a shoe. The appeal of all that coiling & twirling, notes & script— one definition, I suppose, of verse. O, ampersand, you bring two names closer together than even the word “and,” which, according to the Writers Guild, simply means that those credited worked on the same screenplay but quite possibly at different times, maybe one even rewriting the other’s work. An ampersand between writers’ names means that the two were in the same room, collaborating side by side, & though technically I write this ode alone, it is really with Julie Marie Wade (poet) & Sarah Sarai (reviewer) who make me remember how much I loved to draw the ampersand & treble clef & play the keyboard which I learned from Mr. Solek who was a member of a polka band called The Happy Bachelors, & he did seem happy as an adult who wasn’t part of a Mr. & Mrs. or a Mr. and Mrs. The Dating Game was big then. “Bachelorette Number One, if the whole world were listening, what would you say?” The cover of the Bachelors’ album was pink which didn’t imply anything to me at the time, but now I wonder if those bachelors were gay— Mr. & Mr. or Mr. and Mr.— or simply young & hetero & capitalizing on their single status like boy bands do now. The Bachelors recorded together in a studio, twisting horns & button accordions, the “sly female squiggle” a part of all creation. I listened to the album on my parents’ record player & imagined all the kinds of adultness I could possibly one day inhabit, all the associations of sound & symbol & word. I thrilled at the polka music that lived inside the polka dot, the pulsating bouncing ball in the “Sing Along with Mitch,” the seed that would one day blossom into karaoke. Yesterday the Supreme Court struck down DOMA which meant a lot of celebration & yet this morning we read that the ruling won’t help couples in the 35 states that have laws against gay marriage & sometimes an “&” feels more like a “but.” “Bachelorette Number Two, if you could live anywhere, where would that be?” I download the actual ruling & am soon adrift in legalese. Nothing & everything has seemed to change this 27th day of June in the year 2013. My sister & her husband celebrate their 32nd anniversary in Florida, where two women in love can’t wed. I’m in Portugal where transportation workers, fed up with austerity measures, strike, but those who can afford it flag down taxis, the drivers of which are happy for the extra work. One tells me about his memories of the Carnation Revolution &, because he was a kid when it happened, how he thought every conflict from there on in would be solved with flowers in rifle muzzles. I feel the same nostalgia for Roe vs. Wade &, since I was a kid when it passed, I am dismayed Wendy Davis had to filibuster two nights ago in Texas. “Bachelorette Number Three, if you could travel back or forward in time, what year would you visit and why?” How easy it is for me even now to conflate words & music, memory & fact, & that one simple afternoon when I wrote my first song in the book Mr. Solek gave me, the pages lined with staffs, & I made my ornate treble clef, & writing was writing, & marriage was in a far off key I could barely hear, & then I made an ordinary sandwich & read the liner notes on The Happy Bachelors’ LP sleeve & each ampersand flipped to become shoulders & arms, hugs between each musician’s name.
“Ode to the Ampersand” references Sarah Sarai’s review of Julie Marie Wade’s book Postage Due (White Pine Press, 2013) in Lambda Literary.
I Want to Know You All
I was listening to this sort of ignorant blowhard go on about how teaching is a dumb profession and I did this thing I always do, which is feel smug about how smart and sophisticated I am, but my smugness is a little compromised lately by how I do almost nothing all day besides have an affair in my mind and then wring my brain over what a divorce would do to my daughter, who heretofore has been lucky to have a happy, close family, not even too far off from how we pretend to be in public. So I just kept listening without my hackles up so much and also was bemused about how alike we all are, admiring some people, judging others, thinking we’re so special, and this guy had some good stories. One time a history professor in college told him to go hang himself after he wrote 500 words about pheasants in the French Revolution. He said he must have mentioned those fired up and pitchfork-wielding pheasants a dozen times in that paper. That exasperated historian screaming peasants in the margins always reminded him of his dad, who does probate, which is basically a ton of archival research into plat maps and deeds, birth certificates and death wishes. There are no secrets when someone contests a will. His dad once told him, “You wouldn’t believe the number of cross-dressing farmers there are in Missouri” which made me laugh at first at the hypocrisy of this place, but then realize it’s actually tragic how alone those farmers must feel. It’s ruthless out here, I know. All the longing we till under and to let such a secret slip—probate means some cousin or sister or brother described the dress in front of a judge who considered it fit evidence against a claim. I laughed because I can’t imagine who you are—the man in coveralls who mocks the foamy fern I like poured onto my latte, the one who calls me “hon” that condescending way? Could you be the man always with the sign in front of my doctor’s office or the neighbor who mows the waysides of our country road down to stubble? Maybe you don’t come to town if you can help it anymore either. I want you to know, whoever you are, as someone hungry for variety in the human condition, most especially my own, cross-dressing farmers, you light up the fields for me. I hope you walk into those soybean rows some nights and your flowered skirt swishes your legs in a way that feels like falling in love when you didn’t think you ever could, or maybe you feel rooted, belonging to this soil that made you. I don’t know what’s better, but I want for you such happiness and every last acre your bigot of a father left behind to go with it.
Two Poems on Florida
Hurricane
Naked, floating face down in the tv room filled with seawater seeping from glass doors he had duct-taped against the hurricane, the room a dark aquarium, his white body, bobbing —he must have been asleep on the couch, exhausted after a day of battening down the house when baysurge beached in a swarm of seaspouts churning up the mangrove swamp, the great wave colliding, breaching doors, collapsing walls, wallowing, then tumbling back out as winds shrieked off treetops, sea slosh sucking up drowned frogs, broken snakes, skinned pelicans, dragging leaf muck, sparkles of shattered glass, lawn chairs, rolling a dead manatee, slopping back through tangles of trees, impaled boats, to the seesaw bay sizzling with rain, leaving him rocking in a kelp of curtains, arms outstretched towards something in the green cloudy water.
A Miami Moment
Just home from work, he’s sitting by the patio pond, watching the koi write their slow signatures. Beside him: The Miami Herald gathering humid air, a glass of wine, and the cigar he left last night. A flock of parrots mutters in the seagrape tree. The ylang-ylang has put on its evening perfume and soon the yard will smell like Chanel. Inside his daughter is baking cookies and his wife is taking a pre-dinner snooze. He jumps up screaming. Inside, they yell “What? What!?” and run out to see him pointing up at maybe fifty vultures circling, wings underlit by the setting sun in a swirl of slow turning light. The magic in the realism never far away.
Two Love Poems
The View from Up Here
by Major Jackson
At sunset winter mountains reach across the page long as a look of love. Sometimes my hands want all of your syllables. I walk in kindness when you’re around which is to say I’m feeling Eastern. I gather myself unto myself because you hunger for golden peaks. Night gently offers its diamonds which we stash in silent mumblings. When you speak, I feel unburied yet hear still the dead of my own house. No one cares that I count your eyeblinks. No one cares about all this hard water. The hours are tall as polar caps, and I quicken inside your name.
On Hawk Mountain, Vermont
by Didi Jackson
I am parting with the sun that like a Greek oracle descends the temple of mountains before me. Their silhouette darkens to Oxford blue, elides the current of the sky until I no longer see crest or peak. After moving up from the South, how much should I know of coniferous trees or of chickadees who play their winter song of fee bee, fee bee, the last note toppling an octave from the first like a softly closing door. The Northern sky stands so straight, it uses the largest pines for crutches; they bend under its weight. We have a friend who isn’t happy I’m white. With him, though, the road is just sampling the sound of the rain. So my husband and I hold hands as often as we can, each finger erupting a new continent. But in the early evening, I worry that if pulled over, when my husband lifts his empty hands he is lifting only his blackness. At this hour a chickadee cries in staccato: dee dee dee, dee dee dee. I wonder how it knows my name before I look at our marriage in the milky evening light.
Crepuscle
FOR SHANE
I won’t deny it any longer: the man I love
is a horse galloping through my chest.
Only in thunder may I whisper his name.
*
I tell his mother I am the sort of man
she will never have to think about.
Shame—face of mulch, mouth of black snow.
*
In another story, the body was a bloodless
moon and it was caught by trees.
Dying—moon inhabits like an animal.
*
Someday there will be a night in which a boy
survives falling like light across skin.
Memory—small pocketknife tossed into ravine.
*
I do not believe the world keeps us
rooted in its forest.
He moves through my body like a god.
*
By crux of dawn I retreat every mile it takes
to let him live inside of me.
Him—my bloodless moon, my swollen bed of stones.