is my season
of defeat.
Though all
is green
and death
is done,
I feel alone.
As if the stone
rolled off
from the head
of the tomb
is lodged
in the doorframe
of my room,
and everyone
I've ever loved
lives happily
just past
my able reach.
And each time
Jesus rises
I'm reminded
of this marble
fact:
they are not
coming back.
...
We shall not come again, not to this wet
and summer day, nor to the waylaid place
where you laid waste to me and I to you,
and where we reminisced recalling who
did what to whom. We shall not come again.
Not to the bed we thrashed nor to the memory
of the way I brushed my hair back, nights,
nor to the air we dared to share to breathe,
or couldn't quite. We shall not come again.
No more, my face seen round your corner, or
your briefcase found beneath my table. We
weren't able, apt or sane. We shall not come
again. Nor cry nor clutch, not even once
again. We shall not cover up in quilts
or bear the beast of one another's guilts
or sit in silences made saddest by
what was. We shall not come again. Because.
...
A clementine
Of inclement climate
Grows tart.
A crocus
Too stoic to open,
Won't.
Like an oyster
That cloisters a spoil of pearls,
Untouched—
The heart that's had
Enough
Stays shut.
...
The border
of a thing.
Its edge
or hem.
The selvage,
the skirt,
a perimeter's
trim.
The blow
of daylight's
end and
nighttime's
beginning.
A fence
or a rim,
a margin,
a fringe.
And this:
the grim,
stingy
doorstep
where
the lapse
of passage
happens.
That slim
lip of land,
the liminal
verge
that slips
you past
your brink.
Where
and when
you
blink.
...
They perched on roofs and fences and sills. They posed statue-still on catenary lines. They aligned along cables like prayer beads on rope. They amassed en masse on the cemetery lawn and marauded the broad, yawning fields like cattle. Their cackles were black. Each shadow dove and pecked. They nested in chimneys and chirped at the chime of the church bell. They worked in shifts. Clocked out at odd hours. They laid their eggs in the Vs of trees. They teemed on the dry-baked banks of creek beds, streams the sun had overseen. They teetered on the bed-knob tops of flagpoles. They pitched like pennies into founts. They pitched like babies into wells. They thumped at doors then skulked away like hoodlum teens. They jabbed her. When she cried they did it faster. Everyone knows what happened next. Some grew big as sunflower stalks, others tall like bonfire flames. Or moving vans. Or the sick, brick houses people die inside of every night. Their hatchlings canopied the sky. Was it her fault, then, when they pinned her to the ground and thrust their feathers down her throat? Or wormed between her legs in bad-man ways? Or rattled plumes and whooped and beat her body with their wings? Or locked their talons to her thighs and tra-la-la-ed that ditty from the old-time music box? Or forced their whiskies past her lips? Or put her in the pillory? This was foreplay, in a way. They rolled in rabid packs and woofed like dogs. She couldn't throw a bone. The meat was gone. They chased her and they named her and they boiled her tears and bathed her. Then they ate her.
...
Let us tunnel
Through the rubble,
Through the thrum.
Let us rut through the sum
Of who we were,
Or are,
Or will be in the years to come:
A couple
Of someones
Who used to be in love.
Used to be in love.
Ho. Hum.
These days: Seem to be in hate.
Gypsum, marble, pyrite, slate.
See here. A pit of snakes.
Look there. The rock of your rages.
And I'm in a cable-cage, slinking down your shaft.
You fondle that hefty What if. . . ? as if
To hurl it. All the other holes
Are blatant hells.
A dragline scrapes our fossicked floor.
I am the ether. You are the ore.
This is the war that nobody won.
Like afterdamp collapsing a lung.
You take to swinging a pickaxe.
I take back my vamping kinks
And the pavement beneath us sinks.
This stinks. Think: In-situ leaching
But with leeches, louses,
Lampreys. Oh Spouse,
Your hard hat leaks a surfeit
Of lamp rays that's wasted sub-surface.
A night so pitch it's perfectly black.
A sapphire scarred by a scratch.
Sickness, health, abundance, lack.
The salt in my wound. The shirt off your back.
So our bloodcup runs empty of urge.
The metallurgy
We're made of demands its dirge.
Our burrows diverge.
Our passages split.
Copper, silver, gravel, grit.
Am I—perhaps—alluvial?
Un-live-with-able?
A bit too simple or silty?
Only gold really ought be gilty.
And you are as cold as coal.
I am your dole, your lode,
Your carbon-flawed diamond.
All told: We drilled and hit demons.
Granite, though, is good for graves.
Granted, a mine isn't quite a cave.
What isn't mine, I cannot give.
...
5 am. One-quarter past.
Distant chimes inform me this.
A bell peal knells the mist.
And sunlight's
not yet bludgeoning.
But some light gets blood going.
Last night it was snowing
and now
every path's a pall.
Though mine the only footfalls
at this hour of awe. Above
hangs a canopy of needle leaf.
Below, the season's
mean deceit—
that everything stays
white and clean.
It doesn't, of course,
but I wish it. My prayers
are green with this intent,
imploring winter wrens
to trill and begging scuttling bucks
come back.
There's something that I lack.
A wryneck
bullet-beaks a branch.
His woodworm didn't have a chance.
What I miss,
I've never had.
But I am not a ghost.
I am a guest.
And life is thirst,
at best.
So do not strike me, Heart.
I am, too, tinder.
I'm flammable
as birch bark, even damp.
Blue spruce, bee-eater—
be sweeter to me.
Let larksong shudder
to its January wheeze,
but gift these hands a happiness
just once.
It is half passed.
And I am cold.
Another peal has tolled.
I've told the sum of my appeals.
I need not watch for fox.
They do not congregate at dawn.
But I would,
were I one.
...
Jill Alexander Essbaum (born 1971 in Bay City, Texas) is an American poet, writer, and professor. Her most recent collections are the full-length manuscripts Harlot (No Tell Motel, 2007) and Necropolis (neoNuma Arts, 2008). Essbaum's poetry features puns, wordplay and dark humor, often mixed with religious and erotic imagery. She currently teaches at the University of California Riverside Palm Desert Graduate Center in the Masters of Creative Writing Graduate Program. Essbaum's debut novel, Hausfrau will be published in March 2015 (Random House).)
Poem
A clementine
Of inclement climate
Grows tart.
A crocus
Too stoic to open,
Won't.
Like an oyster
That cloisters a spoil of pearls,
Untouched—
The heart that's had
Enough
Stays shut.