R I C H A R D  J A C K S O N

Personals

from Resonance

Sometimes I am just waiting for the road to get here.
Sometimes I think I exist in a parallel world, like this morning
on this certain September Sunday in New York City.
The way Confucius felt beginning his career as a corn inspector.
You just have to find something to occupy your time.
Like this story in the paper about fish: Grouper are
born female and become male later on. Doesn’t that say
something about our sexual confusion? Not mine, of course.
It’s like Tieresias who gets to do it one way, then another.
It’s the way they now say the universe bounces along
from one Big Bang to another. The whole theory
looks like the graffiti someone painted over on Bowery Street.
It doesn’t matter because you can still hear the moon
rub its back against the stars. The meanings are
all caught in someone’s throat. A baby robin eats 14 feet
of earthworms in a day. That gets me wondering about—
well, I’m not sure, but if I wrote it in here it must be
important. Don’t you see? The windows are all borrowed.
I am listening to Kenny Burrell’s jazz guitar as it slides into
each corner of the room. The air sags. Walls slump.
I wonder if Tomaz will be at supper after the reading.
Some people say he walks on air. Some say he has wings.
It has been a long time since I myself have walked on water.
He is probably dreaming about his favorite Tiepolo or Fra Angelico.
I prefer Caravaggio and all his victims he painted as saints and
prophets. He must have been the cloud hovering over them as
they begged for help. 300 million cells die in the body
every minute without anyone’s help. “Hang in there,”
Paul Watson said in the room the other day, but “hang”? and
from where? Not the sky that keeps wenching itself down
closer and becomes my ceiling. That doesn’t mean heaven is
any closer. Heaven is just a sin away goes the old Kendall’s song.
Or a whisper away goes another version. Who knows? No one
knows what Jesus wrote in the dirt, either. Pica is
a disease where you eat dirt. Sexsomania is a disease where
you have sex while sleeping. This saves a lot of time.
All the clocks in Pulp Fiction are stuck at 4:20. Opossums
reign in the woods behind my house in Tennessee. They have
cloudy eyes and would be ferocious if they weren’t
so stupid, and realized how sharp their fangs and claws are.
The ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain. It resembles
the brains of Wall Street that shrink with every rumor.
An ostrich can kick you to death but you can fly further.
Not like my dog Maggie who is afraid of the wind.
If you have enough diversions, or a good spin doctor,
you don’t have to face the truth. Hence, this poem.
And who would ever check what these things stand for like
the underground river beneath the Nile but is six times
bigger. To testify meant originally to swear by holding
your testicles. There are only two things I’ve made up
in this poem, but really, only the future can reveal them.
The future is the hawk I heard but couldn’t see high
in the trees harassed by crows defending their nests.
The past is a chain saw. There’s no fear that cannot be
translated into a form of love. 21% of frogs in suburban CT
have become hermaphrodites. They drink too much
herbicide, flame retardant and pesticides just like us.
Black olives, those are my favorite. They are stars that have
burnt themselves out. Sometimes the streetlights are aligned
so you have two shadows. You have to watch the other one
so you don’t lose yourself. A chimera is a person who has two
sets of DNA. I never know where my other self wanders
or what she says. Some of my students think I am Marvin Bell
but I don’t understand why they fail to see Marvin is really me.
A starfish can turn itself inside out and hide its own feelings.
What are these words but the shed skins of some snake
that has warmed itself all afternoon on a desert rock?
That’s Marvin who just took us to the desert, not me.
The sunlight that strikes the earth each moment there weighs
as much as an ocean liner. I wonder if Terri and Kari will
return before I have to leave. I’ll just wait. At rest we generate
100 watts of electricity, but if we harnessed it we would be
victims of spontaneous combustion. There’s no reason
we can’t be in two places at once. Everything seems a memory
like boarded up store fronts. Just now, Kenny Burrell’s
guitar is exploding before he mellows out into Soul Lament.
I can burn this CD for you. His music is like a photograph.
The world keeps sticking to his retina. Everything seems to stop.
When galaxies stop spinning they topple over like broken wheels.
These words are like Borneo frogs that have no lungs.
The emperor moth smells a female at 7 miles.
It always knows when the end is near. One wall of graffiti is
always painted over another. Maybe there is no end.
We could go on here forever. But now everyone has arrived.
It’s possible we’ll be late for the reading, but the poem has to
end, like a trash truck loaded with excuses, headed for the dump.

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Read Everything Before Doing Anything

from Unauthorized Autobiography: New and Selected Poems

When the person I was twenty years ago

suddenly appeared at my door last night

I began to suspet in earnest that I am

no longer immortal.  But maybe he was

just a winter fly woken by a few warm hours.

He pulled my old shadows from a cigar box.

He was a dime store dentist trying to extract my past.

Now the moon no longer breathes in my pockets.

The soul's ravens gather on my phone lines.

Now will I have to wait for you to call?

The sun will not be interested in our delays --

will this mean our nights of endless lovemaking

will be cut short?  It has been exactly 8 hours now,

and I am already tired of greeting

the defeated troops of my dreams as they straggle home

unable to look me in the eye.  My own death

looms like the barely perceptible swell

of a tidal wave far out to sea.  If we can't imagine

the end, can it ever happen?

Now each second brings signs of some new apocalypse

like this headline in TV Guide:

DEATH AND DAMNATION: NIELSON RATINGS SOAR!

Or this from Lady's Home Journal:

LOSE 10 LBS BY JUDGMENT DAY

WITH OUR NEW "ARMAGEDDON" DIET!

And here's today's headline from The Wall Street Journal:

TEN WAYS YOU CAN PROFIT FROM THE APOCALYPSE.

8 hours.  That's 480, no 481 minutes since those

grim suspicions about my elleged mortality began.

My previous life has been swept down the ravine

of my dreams.  My previous life is now

a suitcase stuffed with disappointments.

Now every thing I see will

become more important.  Still, there are advantages --

I no longer have to worry

that the Andromeda galaxy is racing towards us

at seventy five miles per second

and will be gobbled up in 6 billion years

by our own gluttonous milky way, though

by then the earth will be a granite shell

and all our words galactic dust, though that in turn

doesn't mean certain suspicious events aren't

already in motion.  Like the dream I just met

from Srebenica, Bosnia, pulling a peasant's cart

of bodies and the tattered old man crawling

out of those bodies to search for his son.

When I look in the mirror it is already tomorrow.

Clouds graze on the sky.  All the clocks are kneeling

in the gutters.  481 minutes and 20 seconds.

Does counting time make us more mortal?

Night drips on the windowsill.  The sky spills out of the gutters.

Is that why sorrow wedges in the corner of your eye?

You could leave as easily as a petal drops from one of your flowers.

Sometimes we can't even flag down our own

guilts.  Now each change means our footprints

no longer fit our feet.  Even the universe has begun

to sag from my shoulders.  Someone said

last week that the universe is turquoise.

Now they have revised that to gray.  These guys

have no idea it is all a dream.  482 minutes.

That's 28,920 seconds. Twenty-one.

When I was immortal I never had to pay attention

to last words like "No, those mushrooms

are the good ones," or "I wonder what this button does?"

or "It probably just wants to be friends."

But even dead things go on struggling.

Which is precisely why each laugh always ends,

each death goes on forever.  Why every real horror was

once somebody's dream of immortality.

Sixty years ago the citizens of Jedwabne, Poland, burnt

their Jewish neighbors alive in a barn.  Even the Nazis were

horrified.  Every time I look the world seems less real.

Take Prejedor, Omarska, the Bosnia

prisoners forced to rape their own daughters.

Or the Rwandan farmer strapped to a post and burned alive.

See, now Memory has already broken

the glass on a rear window and is bleeding

in the kitchen.  I can't bandage it with my best dreams.

29,017 seconds.  Eighteen.  Nineteen.

I've become a stand in for my own life.

A life that's the mound of dirt beside the open grave.

A life that's its only customer at the newspaper kiosk.

Maybe that's why its so embarrassing to go on living

after your love dies.  Do you know what I'm saying?

The ghosts of your touch. The way you could

play marbles iwth the stars.  The way each phrase

curled up at the edges, then gave itself to the flame.

In the end my own words will light on a branch I'll never see.

Only a dream.  Only thirty more seconds now.  But what if

this never ends? - and whose dream is this after all?

All those dead and dying trying to find

some hiding place in the joke of a flower?

The bone of the sun is already crumbling.

The hunter inside my dream of you

is stalking me.  Each dream is fumbling for

a memorable last line, but there are only a few

seconds left "Trust me," says one dream.

"Cover me," says antoher, "Who's bringing up the rear?"

says the dream that thought it, too, was immortal.

You have to read everything before doing anything

because in the end even your life is a revision.

Maybe all our songs are filled with this morning fog.

Maybe Truth is the moth crawling over the lamp shade

still lit by last night's crumpled dreams.

Maybe our dreams are only beggars for the lives we abandon.

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