David Jackson

Blizzard

Snow falls:
years of anger following
hours that float idly down —
the blizzard
drifts its weight
deeper and deeper for three days
or sixty years, eh? Then
the sun! a clutter of
yellow and blue flakes —
Hairy looking trees stand out
in long alleys
over a wild solitude.
The man turns and there —
his solitary track stretched out
upon the world.

***

The Desolate Field

Vast and grey, the sky
is a simulacrum
to all but him whose days
are vast and grey and —
In the tall, dried grasses
a goat stirs
with nozzle searching the ground.
My head is in the air
but who am I . . . ?
— and my heart stops amazed
at the thought of love
vast and grey
yearning silently over me.

***

To Waken an Old Lady

Old age is
a flight of small
cheeping birds
skimming
bare trees
above a snow glaze.
Gaining and failing
they are buffeted
by a dark wind —
But what?
On harsh weedstalks
the flock has rested —
the snow
is covered with broken
seed husks
and the wind tempered
with a shrill
piping of plenty.

***

Portrait of a Lady

Your thighs are appletrees
whose blossoms touch the sky.
Which sky? The sky
where Watteau hung a lady’s
slipper. Your knees
are a southern breeze — or
a gust of snow. Agh! what
sort of man was Fragonard?
— As if that answered
anything. — Ah, yes. Below
the knees, since the tune
drops that way, it is
one of those white summer days,
the tall grass of your ankles
flickers upon the shore —
Which shore? —
the sand clings to my lips —
Which shore?
Agh, petals maybe. How
should I know?
Which shore? Which shore?
— the petals from some hidden
appletree — Which shore?
I said petals from an appletree.

***

Benthams’ Calculus
By Jonathan Huey

I offer a defiant variation:

“Berlin has placed mankind
under the governance of two
equally insane masters,
the criminal larva, and crocodile ecstasy,”

I endeavor to enchant your mind
with a new systematic etiquette
beyond your ethography

what does the eunuch know of pleasure?
what does the masochist not know of pain?

The collective bestial awareness
a mentality cut-off from meaning

beyond cyanide reflection
beyond temporal bone

Spasmodic writhing
pestilential influence
from Chicago to East London,
and coffers of erectile teeth,
the bankers of fantasia-

the calculative eye
a poetic flinch,

pyramid froth
of trench warfare,

incandescent gases
of Valhalla

secret society
of the common leech,

needles in
vertical position,

these variations I offer,
as a salute to creativity
beyond a bipolar understanding
of human existence,

repeating decimals
are rhino droppings
in mathematical mind,

and I am a soybean,
beyond pleasure and pain.

©2000 Jonathan Huey

***