Poem for Sunday

From "One A.M."
Major Jackson
By David Young


You'll show that toad-eater who wrote 'Night Thoughts'
what's happened in two centuries or so.

You'll make your yard the spirit's doorway
to metamorphs and comet-lit inventions.

Go ahead, walk the cathedral-volumned night.
Let Perseids stripe your eyes.

*

I read the other day
that giant black snowballs from outer space
created our oceans.

Center me, physics, keep me
from brooding too long on my fear,
on the pickup truck that rammed the school bus,
on the strange sea pastures of the Persian Gulf,
on love and its string of losses.

Now everything's strings, they say, cosmic strings
that pull the galaxies toward the Great Attractor
holding all matter together.

Microcosm, meet macrocosm.
Solace us with your kinship, make
one little yard an everywhere.

I think of Calvino's
dark, humorous mind,
another squirrel in the treetops--
how he made truth and wit
from troubling loops of knowledge.

And Miroslav Holub,
who lived alone in this house one spring
and pondered this yard as I do.
The appetite for fact
helped him survive, walk around
and laugh to himself, inside
this century's bluntest terrors--
the one that Hitler made,
the one that Stalin added.

A string may link me to them here,
and run
right through the blackened school bus,
the rubble of Beirut,
down to the toxic wastes, on up and out
to the ice ball punching our atmosphere--

Like Theseus in his labyrinth,
I stand here holding
my little end of string.

*

I caught and cupped a firefly just now
like an old miser blowing on his palms
to keep some warmth in.

I'd like that glow to be
The milky streams of star-mess overhead,
the rivulets of words below,

nacreous teeth of the speaker in the dark
words folding into the spiral that runs up

to the coiled shape of galaxies
as the brain whorls match the labyrinthine curves,

echoing stairwell, spinning DNA,
the play with nests and shrinking models,

the sidewise slide, the folding-up of sense,
the web the spider swings and spins, connecting.

*

Is this a dream?--I see my grandpa milking,
I watch my mother watching him.
The cats swarm round, the barn is cold,
the cows chew steadily and stamp
in random patterns, defecate
in flops and splatters, steaming heaps.

I'm the froth of the milk, the silvery pail,
the piles of hay, the cats
spiraling round my legs.
I am the frost-coated lightning rod.

We play with infinity, this is our luck,
measureless measuring, lot lines and boundaries
always deferred, always potential,
doing, undoing, doing, undoing,
we repeat ourselves so infinity
can make love to finity, kiss it,
dance with it all night.

I taste the water from that old farm's well.
The milk was warm. The water's hard and sweet.

*

Repetition's magic. I knew it in my bones.
Let me repeat my dream for you,
let me repeat it for myself.

Let me talk on in this starlight,
these meteor streakings of nonsense,
this chaos, these fractals and freckles.

Don't take my words away from me yet.
I'm doing my midnight weeding,
grasping the thistles close to the root,

I'm losing the dream farm, I'm
probably failing, repeating
what others have said--

but that farm, like an old brown photograph
suddenly filling the senses--
and this night, like a silver gelatin print--

and a string that runs from me to the past:
the view from the farmhouse window
across the silent fields of snow.


, this poem made me think of you. Read it and at a certain point it will become obvious why. You must tell me if there's a connection.

If I were a poem (gacked from ):

I'm the limerick, mired in muck. I refuse to be bored or get stuck.    I like to offend,    But not, in the end, As much as to thwart expectations. HREF="http://quiz.ravenblack.net/poeticform.pl">What Poetry Form Are You?

Last night, for obvious reasons, I had an overwhelming urge to watch a space movie with a happy ending. I chose Space Cowboys rather than Apollo 13 because I remembered that at the end, the damaged shuttle takes the same approach as Columbia did, flying over Texas to land at Kennedy in Florida. (Apollo 13 has a scary final descent as well, but, obviously, the crew's in a capsule, not a shuttle.) I tried to resist the impulse to watch at first, remembering Constance Penley's suggestion in NASA/TREK that Americans were all too ready to allow science fiction to substitute for an actual space program when there were disasters in the past. But in the end I decided that it really wouldn't hurt anything if I watched a movie.

And Space Cowboys is a total feel-good movie -- two movies actually. The first hour and a half is a witty drama about geezers trying to get into space, then suddenly there's a twist that I never saw coming the first time I saw the film and it's an incredibly tense beat-the-clock scenario. The first half is essential to set up the emotional impact of the second half. It's a very enjoyable flick for all the unrealism of certain aspects of the plot. And it has a real feel-good ending, somewhat sad but satisfying.

On the subject of movies, here's The New York Times on how Hollywood rallies 'round the homeland...

And here, just because she's so entertaining, is Maureen Dowd on world leaders and their Hot Rods.