Poemmentary

Misty Harbor

Bruce A. Jacobs

Misty Harbor

 

I bought a parka,

200 dollars on sale,

best you can buy,

you’d know the logo from

mountaineer documentaries.

I’m talking goose down even in

the pocket flaps. Think of a couch

with sleeves. August you can

wear. Snaps, zippers,

loops, cords, pockets within

pockets. With my new parka puffed

around me as I hunched up the street

on a 10-degree New York night,

it was almost as if

nothing was wrong.

In my friend’s foyer, I announced:

This coat has everything.

Look at this zipped wallet pocket.

Sunglasses go here, under the elastic.

Believe me, I’ve been searching and

these features are hard to find. But

do you think it’s too big? It’s stiff

as starch. Look at how it bulges, holds itself

away from me. I guess anything new takes

getting used to, like the way I can’t get

this fat zipper started, Jesus Christ, and the feel

of this balloon collar, a spare tire

around my neck. I’m being stupid,

what a great coat this is,

even though it’s like wearing

a feather-paved Lincoln Tunnel.

Are the arms too long? Why do these cuffs

push my hands toward the ground?

The new parka lay on a chair

while my friend and I had beers

and talked about strange movies

and lovers and the awful night

in high school when my mother

showed up at 2 a.m. at a party

to order me home, which I still consider

the most embarrassing moment

of my life. My friend and I

laughed with relief at those days

being gone, and I said no to one last beer

as I stood to zip into my new

famous arctic parka.

My friend watched me

adjust the spare tire at my neck,

punch my fists through

the Lincoln Tunnel sleeves,

and my friend said, You know,

You need to love your coat, it’s important

that you love it on you

and right now it looks as if

you don’t.

So I drove the 300 miles home

and I took back the coat, collected my 200 dollars,

and I had lunch with my ex-girlfriend,

who by then, five years after my affair,

I was almost able to hug

without crying,

and I said to her, Hey I need a coat, what are

you doing for the next hour, and

in the nearby discount coat warehouse she

ran her chef’s fingers with their

knife scars and stubbed fingernails

over the seams and snaps

of a dozen-odd parkas, did her lip-smack

mimicking of a sour matron shopper,

which always did make me laugh,

and then she handed me the approved coat,

a fluffy number with a hood,

saying, This is a nice buff nylon, soft, see,

almost like suede, but with plenty of down,

and the lining is flannel, feel that,

and look at the label, Misty Harbor,

a good name.

In front of her house, we hugged

one of those hugs that squeeze the years

like an accordion. We held on,

breathing something that rhymed

with loss, until it was time

to let go.

She turned and made for her porch

with her hands in her pockets.

I turned the key in my Honda,

felt the new coat around me,

the flannel’s touch at my neck

softer than life,

and I asked myself,

How do you wear

this kind of

love?

Hate Letter #11 to Washington, DC

Bruce A. Jacobs

Hate Letter #11 to Washington, DC

 

Your air shoves. The scrape of  bodies

beneath preening awnings

and dropped ceilings.

It’s where mere rudeness

loses to actual contempt.

An active home-ruled pursuit.

The mad barging

of tight-suited chasers.

The red-eyed street curses

fired upon tidy lunch-goers by houseless citizens

whose crazy is treated as a choice.

The casual rightness

of donors who return segments

of the proceeds of robbery to charity,

like a baron whose enterprise rescues children barbecued by bombs

but who is mean to those who prepare his papers, cut his hair.

The Chinatown corner of 6^th and H, where

a silver strider collapses to the curb,

still and mute from brain bleed, while

a stranger kneels, her hands on his right thigh,

and pleads, “Can you feel this?”

The light lope, the rolling

Hup! of young doers, eyes fixed

10 years ahead on an escalator.

They are spandexed, cottoned, wooled,

they sport weaves from far-off wounded places,

leading their dogs through daily rituals

of mastery and servitude. Make no mistake:

DC is Dog City. Attorneys, assistants, nonprofit

miracle-ists, campaign consultants who sell brand names

for politics that voters can inhabit but cannot own –

All find it good to come home nights

to a waiting dog mouthing its leash.

This is a take-charge city whose democracy

pounds out hard-circled terms,

as its surveyor, Banneker, scholar of solar systems and stone truths,

a Black man but no slave, would have known.

DC: A city built, like any sensible vault, to hold itself.

Colonial to its lovely core, marbled and rivered,

irrefutable by design with its concentric curbs and wrought spikes,

its daily phalanxes of brown women

now hired to push limousine strollers

bearing tiny pink conspirators who will pay

as adults when they learn they were born into cheating.

DC: Its strained ranks of royally-trained brown children

who too often still avert their eyes

when passing another dark face in some alabaster hallway,

still resisting, all this blood later, the shock of seeing oneself.

DC: Your parallel ranks of brown children officially piped

into their outlawed outrage and confined quarters.

Your pale prisoners of privilege who, underground

on the Red Line through Woodley,

skirt the seats beside Black males

casually as cattle.

Look up from your phones,

watch it happen, on this subway car, then another,

don’t pretend it’s surprising, it’s just that you’re

freed of noticing unless you’re the brown one

hunched in solitary with your leather satchel of brains

planted on the empty seat beside you like a bomb

to claim your forced aloneness, as if to sneer,

You can’t fire me as a potential seatmate. I quit.

DC: With your perennial service

to the wishes of spooked white people –

a Black president’s tiptoed requests

in proper English soon drowned out by gusty cheers

for a flame-haired White House slave auctioneer’s

spittled whip, his screaming horde of slave chasers,

then the apologies, the white hope, the broken build back betters

while the plantation diversifies.

DC: You cancer in blocked belly tunnels,

you choked bloodburst heart,

you fireball avoidance of eyes meeting eyes,

you undeclared war.

DC: This city. The nation

in capital letters.

Tuesday

Bruce A. Jacobs

 

Tuesday

This shit is not happening. I want to write my way

away from white people. Look at them,

here uninvited in my own damned sentences.

As everywhere. It’s their thing,

showing up where the world does not want them.

Write my way out of this white cloud

clogging my pores like some cold-poured keen of the vapors.

Heart busted, brain leaking, junkburping up tar

like some zombie out of a

slave barn novel.

 

Published 2023 in Free State Review

Bridge: for Donald Trump

Bruce A. Jacobs

• Bridge, a 2020 video poem on Vimeo here, is more about Trump in 2024 than I wish it were.

Photo: Bruce A. Jacobs

Bridge

 

On the Duke Ellington Bridge in DC,

Looking through the lime green railing bars

Southward, as if in some open-tuned jail far above

The road following Rock Creek through the city,

The scenic creek’s catheter never quite draining this valley

Of tire traffic, a humming river of rubber, orange-bladdered sun hung

Over the building line to the west. A lone high-rise antenna

Pokes its way toward the sunset like a needle wanting to thread

Some lost seam into space.

On the sidewalk along the green railing, two kids

Pedal-rattle on scooters that parse their wake

Of parted air with laughter, a re-percussion

Of pebbled skate you can hear through

your skin, rolling wheel-lump beneath your surface,

Innocent, insistent as a chigger.

The trees clasp earth-crust deeply as always,

New leaves dull whitish in becoming color,

Thousands of them exhaling per moment.

Up here, on the bridge, a muscle car rolls past the low fence of curb, thundering

Like a weightlifter clad in racing stripes, dressed

To show, to frame power for all it is worth in the fleeting moments

Of available awe. Washington, DC, some time before

We were afraid to breathe.

A hundred feet below, cars follow the creek road’s hard-bent needle

Into the tunnel mouth,

DC buses tattooed with their logo, a red, yellow, and gray sweeping arrow

That says your paid fare is the wind to everywhere

In a city where this man can be president:

This worm of shitted opportunity,

This sightless, thankless maw of whiteness in the dark,

Surging, thriving, boasting into the sod like a baby

Who brags about having been born.

And that’s the thing: the politics of this gridded squirm,

The policied paths marked as nature, like a park sign written

By a biologist about the natural phenomenon

Of children hoteled in steel cages. A fake natural refuge.
A new and armed order of passage. You: March. Trample

The wreckage of proven truth.

Wickedness made familiar by daily force. Problem is,

Nothing dies alone. The thing that kills also eats, shits tiny

New houses, bubbled neighborhoods, rocket ships to

Sameness. Salmon spawning along a backwater grave.

Scraping sounds in new gravel redds

That hatch shrieking offspring,

Their skins swept off in the grind of bleeding glaciers

That a Great Liar titles Home.

We have the villain. Problem is he will not satisfy

By his demise. This is my problem: What I have

Is all of us, buying from villains who own what we need,

Voting for villains who sell what is public and who accept

Biweekly payment for our bodies in private. Swallow

And you’ll hear it: The hushed suck in the seams

Of this hired universe we embody, leaking faster than we can inhale self-repair.

In our forced labor of daily self-murder we ask, Why do I do this? I cannot do this.

I did not do this. Who did this? And the tree boughs below, along Rock Creek,

Bend, the wind kiss-whisking their April tendrils

The way I wish I could: rest. breathe free. Here, seven months into

Our hanging Covid sentence, its tightening crush of breath

Between two closing walls:

Our fear of the assassinating air and our need to take the air in. Our need to

Trust our birth lesson that there is at least one free thing

On Earth: breathing, our built-in talent for perpetual motion,

A lived exception to gravity, to entropy, to the known work of physics

Whereby we piston our lung-ed essentials in and out of ourselves

Free of any felt friction, freed of intent.

A near-hundred-year miracle for any one of us, if you or I are bodily lucky,

An effort-free automatic. Breathing: Open-mouthed, unintended, unattended, unending.

Until a thing like now. Crushing our chests, pre-angina flood,

Threat wafting, invisible, through our fantasied air,

Our 10 breaths per minute now fearful of every true tale the wind blows home:

The way these river trees lean in all directions because no way is wrong

When there is sunlight, wind, air, water, slowly obedient stone.

The way the way a humped street in Baltimore

Ran for me one night like a crackling brick glacier, a river in pieces.

My body was cheesecloth, a screen, unbottomed bucket,

Ceaseless arc of passage, unbounded void of born stars.

No surface, no containment, utter surrender,

Effortless companionship, unrelenting relaxation.

Like everything, forever truth and lie.

The sun sets, the treeline below the high bridge

Dims, as its edge blurs always

Toward nextness, world

Incessantly coming.

 

- April 2020. Published on Vimeo.

Punch Line

Bruce A. Jacobs

 

Punch Line

She’s gone fetal,

curled like a fishhooked worm

in the hospital bed, all scabs

& sores from nights of waking up

at the bottom of the living room stairs

or flat on the kitchen tile.

After eight years of a heart’s

coming up shorter &

shorter for air,

her bones hoist skin

like a losing sail

& chewing one mouthful

of crushed ice

leaves her breathless.

Her 40-year-old daughter

raises the blanket, crawls in

up against her, a spoon nesting

from behind. She lifts

her mother’s hand & does nothing

but hold it, the way a parent might

gently steer a vomiting child

back into the world.

Her mother lies on her side

& bitches at the Lord

like only an 80-year-old Catholic can:

all this, & now flu & fever

& a God who withholds

death.

Who knew that dying

could be like paint that won’t dry?

Blood trapped against the ceiling

while the ship dawdles at sinking.

I once knew a woman

who lay on her mother’s grave

& talked to her as if

they were on bunkbeds.

I wonder if they spooned

through the brain cancer,

a daughter digging in with her hips to

help mama push her way

out of here.

This fever is hell, the mother breathes

at me with what’s left

of a whisper

& nearly a smirk. She gets the joke

of being unable to die, of giving

the Savior the finger.

She reaches, strokes my hand

like a gypsy & rasps,

"I’ll pray for you"

without looking to see

if I laugh.

 

Published in Loch Raven Review

Survivors

Bruce A. Jacobs

Survivors

            -for Arthur Fuller

 

Palm trees

guard the rail platform

like spears.

See? Somebody still knows

how to plant a war

here in the suburbs of  L.A.,

where you laid down your fly rods

and died.

I’m gaining on New York

one rolling steel inch at a time,

losing my chance to yell back

from the throat of this train:

Man, you should have

played tenor. With a saxophone

a brother can blow through

hairpin turns at speed

and leave no blood

in his tunnels.

But then I think of Coltrane

in a photo near his end,

awaiting a train

with his hand on his liver.

Some solos come with no

exits. Like you, Arthur, in law school

in Wyoming, circa 1965,

walking into sporting goods stores

and asking white men for bullets.

I recognize the smile

on the front of your funeral program.

There you are, a black man hip-deep

in virgin snow,

hoisting a buck’s head

by its antlers, and grinning

like John the Baptist.

Your wife, Sarah, tells me the cancer

ate you belly-first,

spring to September,

but how many years

did the warm-up crowd work you?

Spellbound white women

clutching ratskin purses

in your face, pink men jabbing

like greenhorn banderilleros

while you refused to shut

the million tiny brown gullets

in your skin.

Meanwhile,

a trout faces upstream

through a half-buried tire,

rides the wet cyclone

with open jaws

ten feet from my knees.

I lean into the torrent, roll the rod to

lay myself out with the line,

a move I know from my father,

who for 40 years pulled

fish from curdled green water

below the power plant,

and, despite newspaper warnings,

sat down to platters

of crisp tainted corpses

with the pure appetite

of belief.

 

Published in XXXXXXX: XXXX audio anthology, link to Spotify url

Second Sight

Bruce A. Jacobs

 

Second Sight

the beauty of night

is in the undoing of seeing.

a hand closes around the world,

unlit hours bring

a gift of blindness,

a sharpening of

the rest of what we know:

the graze of air in its endless travel,

the easy riot of riding earth’s rocket

on one’s back, eyes closed.

what a time,

this roll in the black hay,

this swim in the dark thick of things,

this short tunnel of sight

between the light and the light.

 

• Published in Loch Raven Review, (year)

Due Process

Bruce A. Jacobs

 

Due Process

I lean across the stained velour driver’s seat of my 1998 Mercury Sable,

Lay my hand like a gasp

On the high cheekbone of a woman

From Homer, Alaska, who breathes in monotone.

Homer, Alaska: 460 miles south

Of the riverbank where a grizzly sow declined to gut me

When I thrashed blind past her and her 2 cubs

In the blueberries, me jangling my string of bells

And singing apologies I’d learned

From a white guy in a sweat lodge.

Homer, where the fish processors heave

20-pound king salmon into cement pits

For the gutters to rip, scour like sinew sacks.

Homer, where the 20-mile granite penis they call The Spit

Dangles into the now-thawing Pacific.

She is from Homer, Alaska, on just long enough a stay

In her 300-square-foot East Baltimore rental

To lean in from the passenger seat

With one soft-cliffed cheekbone and our 7 days of emails

About the swallowed presences in the

Abandoned 1938 shafts of the Kennecott copper mines,

About the difference between ghosts and spirits,

About the dead, immersed undissolved beneath crackling tundra permafrost,

About the van that carried eight drunken musicians

And a clothed mannequin named Timmie

100 miles through nightlong twilight to the next bar.

She leans in with her kiss that I cannot believe is kissing me back

On our first date at 2AM in my 98 Mercury double-parked outside of her

Tunneled crash pad. We kiss

For years, lips clasping the moist lines between

The trilobites, dinosaurs, nervous primates, until

At this one night’s tick in the oxygenated eons

The cops we don’t know are parked 15 feet behind us

Have had enough. They let us have it

With the searing blue light and the

Choked fragment of siren and she lets go my lips

And she bursts, laughing and waving Thank You,

Out of the 98 Mercury passenger door

And she slips through her wrought iron apartment gate

And I ease the accelerator toward the 1st traffic light

As the single cop car in the mirror kills its top light

And peels off into an alley

And I exhale

As if I’ve gotten away.

 

• Published as As If I've Gotten Away in Free State Review, Sagittarius issue, 2023

Magic

Bruce A. Jacobs

 

Magic

Makes no sense. This late at night,

a little girl in sneakers wielding

a stick? Three feet of hollow prod, alley bamboo,

one wooden tap and each kid runs.

Crazy is contagious.

She flaunts the wand like dime-store jewelry,

treasure of the moment, trigger-ready

in case of need for sorcery as they pass by my stoop,

knowing I could be anybody, hands in my pockets like that.

Her brown face bolts at me, pops me with a “Hi!”

They billow laughter up the street:

“You talked to him   –   talked to that man   –  you so bold.”

It’s crazy. Taking potions literally,

casting my bones on sooted marble,

believing bulrushes can push through concrete

and shelter babies left in alleys.

I want to tell her that her world

is reed and stone. She ought to

learn construction. One cannot trust

the way things work in moonlight.

It’s crazy. Making games with strangers,

playing where she’s not supposed to,

a black girl shaking giggle sticks into the night.

 

Published in Speaking Through My Skin by Bruce A. Jacobs, winner of the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award, Lotus Poetry Series, Michigan State University Press, 1996.

 

Gary with a Catfish

Bruce A. Jacobs

 

Gary dangles a two-foot catfish

From his lawn chair in the

        Lakeside photo, right hand

                     Hoisting the three-pounder

Like the long weight of one of

        His past marriages. I think this

                   Because he is nearly smiling

Beneath his 12-inch beard.

        Behind him, trees blur

                   Green cotton against brown water.

Gary is looking down at the

         Dangled fish’s sledge head.

                   The fish is looking out at

What may or may not be death

         Since the photo tells us only

                   Here hangs the catfish.

Here sits Gary

        Sleepless with pain

                   Ankles bloated like goiters

Hours or years away

        From never waking.

                  He writes poems about a

Winter sparrow he thinks may

        Outlive him, and how his

                  Hardline sister

Laughed to him about

        How she wanted to take a stick and

                  Poke their spear-mouthed mother

In the casket

         At her funeral

                  To make sure she was dead.

 

• Published in Free State Review, 2023 Sagittarius issue