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For the Inauguration of William Jefferson Clinton, 1997 Language The Women Who Loved Elvis All Their Lives I Write My Mother a Poem Dock Bombay Hook The Poet Laureate Addresses the Delaware Legislature Opening its First Session After September 11 Monarchs Elusinian Mystery Poems 
THE NINE DAYS Poems by Fleda Brown Jackson Images by Norman Sasowsky |
For the Inauguration of William Jefferson Clinton, 1997
Not having been asked to write the inaugural poem,
even though I am from Arkansas, I will take what’s here,
the birds at the feeder, not saving the world but only
being it, each kind of bird taking up its career
to fill out some this-or-that of creation on a small scale,
like this poem nobody asked for and few will hear.
Cold birds, eating extra for warmth, finely detailed
to catch the sun. Ridged out in friction-gear,
they jerk from position to position, as if the eye’s
first impressions have been caught before the brain
smooths them out. The chickadee clamps a precise
seed and tosses its shell, nothing amazing.
To start up a fanfare would be to see it as specimen,
to deflect one’s attention from the exact life performing
its dip, crack, toss. The long beak of the wren
is extended by a thin white stripe traced full-swing
down the head, so the wren seems half beak. I need
to get these lines, delicate as a Chinese painting.
Any poem would quiver with delight, with the chickadee
in it, or wren, but wouldn’t want to do anything
about it. That’s the hard thing about writing a poem
that’s supposed to inspire the country at a crucial time,
that’s supposed to hammer like a woodpecker. No one
could hear, with its hammering red, black, white!
It doesn’t bode well for the quiet poem, or the insect
inside the bark, or the old tree crumbling to dust
inside itself while the public word tree holds it erect.
Still, I think when the bleachers no longer rise august
along Pennsylvania Avenue and the meandering ocean
of confetti has been swept up, it is good to cross a bridge
in your mind, to something earlier, oblivious to emotion,
something like wrens going on inside the language.
--first published in Shenandoah, 47 (Winter 1997)
Language
One day Adam said “Adam”
and found out he was standing
across the field from everything
else. It scared him half to death.
He lifted his arms as if they
could help. The air felt cool.
So he said “air” and “cool”:
a population of not-Adams
sprouted everywhere. One
of them was Eve, a wild card.
He heard her clearly, distinct
from his internal voice, his
private naming. She was singing
“In time, the Rockies may tumble,
Gibraltar may crumble…”
and sure enough, it was
something o’clock already.
He saw that her mouth was pink.
“Pink,” he said, because it was
small and had lips to push the air
away. And there was something
else, he was sure of it, a softening
of the air between them,
a spell. Nothing could be the word
for it. He was reeling
with the wound of it, the chink
between subject and object.
Light entered, memory followed
and began to tell its own story.
He felt himself held in it,
traveling within it, now,
driving toward a particular town.
“Something’s happened,”
he said to her, but she’d guessed
the doom of it already, the wooden
signs along the highway
bravely standing for everything
that matters: Burma Shave,
Kollectibles Kottage, The Cock
& Bull. She ran a finger delicately
along the window as if she could
trace what it was that had
broken loose from the two
of them, that was running crazy
out there, never looking back.
--from Breathing In, Breathing Out, Anhinga Press, 2002
The Women Who Loved Elvis All Their Lives
She reads, of course, what he's doing, shaking Nixon's hand,
dating this starlet or that, while he is faithful to her
like a stone in her belly, like the actual love child,
its bills and diapers. Once he had kissed her
and time had stood still, at least some point seems to
remain back there as a place to return to, to wait for.
What is she waiting for? He will not marry her, nor will he
stop very often. Desireé will grow up to say her father is dead.
Desireé will imagine him standing on a timeless street,
hungry for his child. She will wait for him, not in the original,
but in a gesture copied to whatever lover she takes.
He will fracture and change to landscape, to the Pope, maybe,
or President Kennedy, or to a pain that darkens her eyes.
"Once," she will say, as if she remembers,
and the memory will stick like a fishbone. She knows
how easily she will comply when a man puts his hand
on the back of her neck and gently steers her.
She knows how long she will wait for rescue, how the world
will go on expanding outside. She will see her mother's photo
of Elvis shaking hands with Nixon, the terrifying conjunction.
A whole war with Asia will begin slowly,
in her lifetime, out of such irreconcilable urges.
The Pill will become available to the general public,
starting up a new waiting in that other depth.
The egg will have to keep believing in its timeless moment
of completion without any proof except in the longing
of its own body. Maris will break Babe Ruth's record
while Orbison will have his first major hit with
"Only the Lonely," trying his best to sound like Elvis.
--from The Women Who Loved Elvis All Their Lives, forthcoming from Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2004
I Write My Mother a Poem
Sometimes I feel her easing further into her grave,
resigned, as always, and I have to come to her rescue.
Like now, when I have so much else to do. Not that
she'd want a poem. She would have been proud, of course,
of all its mystery, involving her, but scared a little.
Her eyes would have filled with tears. It always comes
to that, I don't know why I bother. One gesture
and she's gone down a well of raw feeling, and I'm left
alone again. I avert my eyes, to keep from scaring her.
On her dresser is one of those old glass bottles
of Jergen's Lotion with the black label, a little round
bottle of Mum deodorant, a white plastic tray
with Avon necklaces and earrings, pennies, paper clips,
and a large black coat button. I appear to be very
interested in these objects, even interested in the sun
through the blinds. It falls across her face, and not,
as she changes the bed. She would rather have clean sheets
than my poem, but as long as I don't bother her, she's glad
to know I care. She's talked my father into taking
a drive later, stopping for an A & W root beer.
She is dreaming of foam on the glass, the tray propped
on the car window. And trees, farmhouses, the expanse
of the world as seen from inside the car. It is no
use to try to get her out to watch airplanes
take off, or walk a trail, or hear this poem
and offer anything more than "Isn't that sweet!"
Right now bombs are exploding in Kosovo, students
shot in Colorado, and my mother is wearing a root beer
mustache. Her eyes are unfocused, everything's root beer.
I write root beer, root beer, to make her happy.
--from Breathing In, Breathing Out, Anhinga Press, 2002
Dock
Say dock, dock: it's just a hollow
of itself, the way the foot
echoes between wood and water,
the plank, plank of it
like piano keys, growing hollower
farther out under the stars.
Listen to the way dock's closed in
by the tongue on one side, pushed out
at the far end toward the lake
with a duck-sound, quack-
sound, where they congregate
for crumbs. It's even a tongue,
itself, saying nothing but
what you bump against it.
Or an arm, reaching out. Here
you're willing to make yourself sociable,
declare yourself separate
from the trees. "Dock here,"
you offer. Here is a place
to stop. And it's true. Indeed
I have to stop at the end
and think. The reason
for walking out here is
how the end goes blunt.
You feel your blood turn back
toward the heart, but
for an instant, you imagine,
it longs to keep moving out
like Roadrunner at the edge of a cliff,
keeping on with nothing built
to hold him up. Turning back,
I carve a cul-de-sac in the air,
which is a comfort, and a sadness.
--from Do Not Peel the Birches, Purdue University
Press, 1993
Bombay Hook
Out of a great breathing emerge
winged things, a leafing, a shaping, a gathering.
Purple grackle crouch thick as leaves
in the trees. Then at some faint twinge
in the fabric of the day, they are wings,
a black rage in the sky. They are all
like that: starlings like schools of fish,
darting and swarming, thousands of snow-geese
lifting and dropping to the pond in waves;
even the lone marsh-hawk, glinting
like a huge butterfly, buckles to wind
inside a faultless curve. Before dark,
low tide gathers plovers and pipers
dipping into the muck. The sunset sky
turns restless and winged: so many nights
in the world, who could count them?
The one breath keeps on like a sleeping child
under a down quilt, turning by the will
of a dream, or the twitch of a muscle that knows
what it sends away, and what it holds.
The Poet Laureate Addresses the Delaware Legislature Opening its First Session After September 11
Naturally we go on, even though the great
double watermark stands behind everything, now.
Even this poem—if you held it to the light,
you could see the Towers shadowing behind it, their steel
beams bare couplets of moonlight. How free
this poem might have been, I like to imagine,
if the Towers hadn’t shaped it. How free the air was,
before its division into good and evil, before
the planes, before the law of gravity. What law
could we possibly have passed to keep the air from leaning
one way instead of the other? Here we are,
in Delaware, a breath south of New York: whatever
shadows the City, surely shadows us.
And, too, we have these eroding beaches, poultry
manure greening the bay, houses spreading
across the broad expanse of farms. Still,
here comes this poem, setting up its boundaries,
its own little rules, trying to start over, to be
the kind of poem even kids can say by heart.
It wants St. Georges bridge in it, arched like a dolphin,
the C & D canal gleaming through it like a crack
in an egg lit from the inside. It wants to be the kind
of poem with snow geese lifting off from Bombay Hook.
Word by word it starts building itself out of nothing.
It listens to its heart, the encouraging beat of its heart’s
own law, law, law—except for
that double shadow, that one missed systole,
diastole—and then again the blessed law.
The monarchs blink
along the buddlia bush, eye-level, acting like
the butterflies of my childhood,
except for the one that fights its way to the top
of the poplar tree, hauling itself
heavenward on a guy-wire.
The monarchs agitate
over their upcoming trip to Venezuela--
who would have thought it?--little leather-wings,
more torqued up than crows or any
of the birds, miniature thrusts, as if someone
had dropped a Picasso and made
monarchs, splintered
into Monet or Manet, thousands of jewels--
diamonds--because a butterfly's wings have no pigment
at all, only little prisms that try to
deflect attention from the fiercely secret source.
Easy to imagine that one thing stands for another:
monarchs erupting
wet from a former life, baptised by immersion.
Forgive me, I only recently learned
they have no former life. The caterpiller melts
down to pure DNA. It is not a matter of re-shaping,
as if it had a sex-change operation. It is
a monarch, finally
shed of whatever sluggish thoughts
had dramatically misunderstood what life this is.
