Jane Springer Poems

Who made the banjo sad & wrong?
Who made the luckless girl & hell bound boy?
Who made the ballad? The one, I mean,
...

This is the last 2 a.m. song fit for poling a johnboat through the swamp
so we may glide, quiet enough, to catch frogs with our hands.

It's the year Robertlee can't afford a suit to take me to prom.
...

Who made the banjo sad & wrong?
Who made the luckless girl & hell bound boy?
Who made the ballad? The one, I mean,
where lovers gallop down mountain brush as though in love—
...

When they told us Don't speak until spoken to, we grew
ears the size of corn.
...

I was born in a Tennessee sanatorium hours after my mother's father died & I know
how the womb becomes a salt-sea grave.
I was born in the last seconds of small crops & small change rained down on the
collection plate's felt palate & I know
...

We should all be
so sure the check's in the mail & the cash in the bank & the bank
in the black—forgive me the promises I took back:
...

That shell of our house in Calvary, Georgia no longer reminds me
of the porch—old couch & crush of blackberries,
empty-paned windows, cracked board of Lady Day's voice thrown
into the musk-dirt yard where we danced—
...

I write you on a host of unseen things: The fine impression of bones
dissolved in the face of a stone—
on tendrils of incense allemanding through the first ambrosial jasmine,
verdant & white-starflower spring.
...