“NEW YEAR’S EVE,” “BODY AND SOUL,” “JANUARY DREAM,” and “THE LAST HOUSE YOU LIVED IN”
by Mark Jackley
“NEW YEAR’S EVE”
Upon inventing the puzzle, our forebears left the garden,
searching for answers, oddly shaped pieces of the picture.
Tonight, uncounted snowflakes land on cars, the sidewalk,
the coffee shop with its own drifters. On delighted tongues.
No two are shaped alike, and still we don’t know why,
though earth and sky are closer. Even our footprints shine.
“BODY AND SOUL”
In his book of photographs
The Jazz People of New Orleans,
Lee Friedlander is working
in the silvery almost-heaven
of black-and-white, setting
earthly things aglow: a crucifix
on the stained wall behind Cie Frazier,
the chewed-up cheap cigar
in Roosevelt Sykes’s hand,
an old-school can of Schlitz
stubbornly clutched by Chester Zardis,
two cigarettes on the lips
of a skinny kid in a pimp hat,
and let us not forget
Sunny Henry’s slide trombone,
Punch Miller’s trumpet,
Big Head Eddie Johnson’s sax.
The players are looking back
on the world of blood and bone,
of slaughterhouses, brothels,
Tipitina’s, Congo Square,
their watery eyes as filmy
as the corrupted Mississippi.
The glossy book is cool
in my wrinkled hands.
“JANUARY DREAM”
A future ex-wife is watching TV.
I am calling customer service
to fix what isn’t working,
the cable plan, our furnace,
whatever we were fighting about.
When I hear a woman’s voice
ask how she can help me,
the words catch in my throat.
I stumble out of the house
and climb into my car. I haven’t said a thing.
She gently asks again,
a kind voice in the dark.
The tears begin to flow.
I close my eyes and breathe,
after so much time on hold.
“THE LAST HOUSE YOU LIVED IN”
Your driveway, slanting down into the carport, maybe eight feet
below the street, recalled a grave. A little bit, anyway. Though metaphor,
I’m guessing, flatlines like the brain, the drip of meaning ceases,
a busted coffee machine. And there I go again. Honey, this is hard.
Speaking of hard, your narrow bed was never coffin-like, not even
in the middle—not the dead of—winter. But that creaky house
where drafts were breaths—okay, I’ve gotta stop. Only your death
was death. Everything else was not.
Mark Jackley’s work has appeared in Fifth Wednesday, Sugar House Review, The Cape Rock, Natural Bridge, and other journals. HIs new book of poems Many Suns Will Rise is forthcoming from Main Street Rag Press. He lives in Purcellville, Virginia, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
