The story could start with the man: “In the three years I’ve owned this place I’ve seen a lot of messed up things come through here. I think you look the worst.” My face scratched from here to here. I nod and smile. It hurt. Over the intercom: “Maggie is loose. Maggie is loose.” My dog couldn’t wait inside the truck stop. She comes to me and we sit together in the storeroom on the blanket from the trooper’s car, bright yellow. The state trooper has a beagle who chews through expensive blinds and carpets. He has hit ten deer, four of them in his patrol car. The story must have started when the deer stepped out of the night. I don’t know what happened to the deer. I never asked. I have to pull over to the side of the road. I remember thinking that. The dog jumped over two seats into my lap, my lap full of shivering dog and air bag. When an airbag deploys the car fills with a powder that smells and looks like smoke and for a short time you are sure the car is going to explode. Maybe it started when I ignored the neighbor. He told me not to leave. “Stay here.” I was crying over a box of sweaters and mothballs. Years of Christmas presents to my father. Sitting on the stairs bawling. The neighbor offered me a gin and tonic. I’m sure it started earlier in the week. With the jar full of pen tops, only the tops. The TV guide so old Alan Alda was in uniform. The collection of broken pencils. The 21 unopened packets of flower seed, mostly geraniums. When he pulled out of the drive way. When she flew away. When we were all gathered in the church dining hall for their 50th anniversary and there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.
— Kathy Jennings
The next to last poem
No, I can’t turn my head. I slept with five books under my pillow. The Complete Poems of — probably was
a mistake. But now I don’t have to read them. It’s all up here. You cannot put a fire out — You cannot fold
a flood — See, it works! Now I can write the Greatest Poem ever written. So astonishingly brilliant no one
will ever want to write another poem. This will be a five star, no, ten star poem. One star for each
reference to a living poet and two for a dead poet. Two artfully inserted words in Italian (Google rocks!)
and a reference to “Ars Poetica” (oh, wait, is that so 1990?) — stars for me! My subject — Charon, drunk
healer, half-man half-horse, Centaur, in a word (Greek mythology allusion, two stars). This started at
about 4 a.m. Where do things in dreams go? Do they pass to the dreams of others? Just before the dogs
started barking. 4 a.m. that time when the aliens start downloading their instructions. If you are in a thin
space at 4 a.m. you might leave this plane altogether. Took one of the empty sleeves between my fingers
and held it — the rough, palpable fabric I reached through the other side. Shut up! They are a beagle
and a shepherd. See them? Beagle mix and Australian Shepherd to be honest and true. I switched it
’cause I think beagle and shepherd is more poetical. There’s not much poetry in dogs barking sharply at 4
a.m. On Tuesday this poem was about my father. In his hospital bed. Dying, dying, dying, still dying, but
maybe not fast enough and not knowing whether to pray please don’t kill him or maybe kill him faster
because this time or next time he might not be able to feed himself and some days he doesn’t talk but this
time he might not be able to talk even if he doesn’t want to. Or about my mother who is not dying, yet.
Sad poems about crazypeople. It’s what I write. She thinks more symbolically than he does and it seemed
to have saved her. This is about 4 a.m. and how I can’t stop the dogs from barking. Can’t even see what
makes them bark. Can’t stop him from dying. Can’t stop anyone from leaving. (But) I could end-stop this
line anytime I want. Or let my line length go right off the page. Go giddy with enjambment. A line I spent
weeks crafting can be crossed out, exiled, exterminated. Sieg Heil (foreign anguage, Nazi German, no
points). You’re right. I never spend weeks revising lines. Don’t be so literal. This is a poem. (You can take
away my stars?) Once I wanted to write about finding new parents. I could make you believe they were my
real parents. Poets can do that. Now she is old and he is dying.
And I find I want to keep my parents as long as I can.
What strange appetites we have that make us rewind time and summon up the landscapes of
our pain long after the lips have been unleashed from their humiliated smiles. I know you are shocked
and disappointed to find out poets make things up. But you can believe I would never lie to you. Truth
and the imagined are not mutually exclusive. If the emperor (insert cliche of choice here). If you chose
has no clothes — I made you think that. When I am a famous poet I will make you come, too. What special
word gets you off? Shudder and scream? (Obligatory sexual reference, all points restored.)
Don’t take an 11 year old to visit her mother in the state mental hospital. Just don’t. Stop saying
suicide is cowardly. That much pain is too much to endure. Call it cruel; that’s undeniable. A man, with
long flowing beard, arm reaching, finger outstretched says thou shalt not rhyme. But internal rhyme is
cool and often lyrical. Slant rhyme violates no commandments except when used on the Sabbath. Version
six had no punctuation. Way over the top. If your God is too big for one religion I will pray for you — like a
Buddhist: Gate Gate Paragate Parasumgate bodhi swaha (1) It’s supposed to start with Ohm but that
sounds so silly. Do you worry about life as material? About being an observer? Not a participant? Does
observation equal participation? Was it where they lost me I finally found myself? Suffering is a place to
visit. Don’t live there. If you decide to live there you will probably have to kill yourself and we’ve already
established your survivors will consider you cowardly when all you are is cruel. If everyone were poets
would we wear our hearts on our slips? Would we fight wars with ghazals? (Formerly obscure form
reference, popularized by Heather McHugh, half-point.) Will someone please declare fatwa against me
for suggesting it ? One day in class we experimented with opening up our heads and showing each other
what was inside. When we were graded, I got a C. Since I couldn’t be brightest, I would rather have been
the dimmest. Americans are like that. The emperor is naked, elect him president. Americans will spend
money on incomprehensible literature, too. It makes them feel smart to know how ignorant they are.
(Self-flagellation was once a national pastime. Now it’s only for blue states.) They like having smart
books on their shelves. If you tell me Eco’s “Name of the Rose” is your favorite book I will find you and
make you eat every page. My insurance company pays a man big bucks to talk me out of feeding pages of
Eco to strangers. My single-minded quest for decades has been insanity denied. I know a few tricks. When
a misery-making thought starts looping through your brain shout STOP silently, of course. After two
years you won’t have to shout it. BLINK. You won’t remember that night when you drank STOP so much
and walked across town STOP and got into his car STOP. See, it works! Do you know the difference
between self-preservation and selfishness? They look the same. They are not. Self-preservation is sitting
in a circle of twelve women building a temple of light. Bat-shit crazy. Insanity embraced. (Define insane.)
Easier than fighting it and the energy makes your hair stand on end. (Define poem.) The aliens told me
a poem is charged language so if this is ever done I’m gonna take it and connect it to jumper cables
and see what lights up. It was the kind of morning the dark never left. The truly wild were curled up,
asleep, or in some high nest looking down. There was no way they would let us love them just right.
I used to believe in words. Really believe. I don’t trust them. (Unless they’re Hebrew.) Anymore. There
are too many words. Some days I wander around muttering “too many words.”
Let’s invent a new form.
Shorter than haiku. Just ku. A two-word poem.
Don’t Leave.
Don’t Die.
Love Me.
— Kathy Jennings
- Go Go Go beyond, Go far beyond into the Wisdom. (Loses something in translation, right?)
With apologies to Emily Dickinson, Pablo Neruda, Raymond Carver, Robert Haas, Tony Hoagland, Stephen Dunn, and Wendell Johnson and Buddhists everywhere.
“Well, they believe that when they have listed all His names — and they reckon that there are about nine billion of them — God’s purpose will have been achieved. The human race will have finished what it was created to do, and there won’t be any point in carrying on.” — The Nine Billion Names of God, Arthur C. Clarke
Princess Maggie Golden Eyes
Lady Long Legs of the Field
Her Highness Princess of Pounce Upon
If I said nine hundred names for Maggie
She would still be Dog
Maggle Waggles at the door
Mistress Curiosity
Stinky, Stubby, Freckles,
Pinky, My excitable beast,
Menace to Domesticity
If I chant nine hundred names for Maggie
She would still be Dog
She barks at the snow plow in the park,
Studies the city lawn mower as it moves
like the cows her grandma rounded up,
gives in to the imperative to chase.
Racing in sweeping circles,
she barks directions to the giant machine.
It refuses her lead.
She chases gulls.
No one told her she can never catch them.
Maggie, nearly airborne.
Left on the dining room floor,
the mole’s perfect flat tunnel-making feet press
against the wood.
In the yard, I have heard the mole
scream. I have found the rabbit’s ears.
Discovered unrecognizable pieces of fur on the pillow.
Hunter, Wrangler, Maggie the Gift Giver
If I say nine hundred for Maggie
She would still be Dog.
She dances across the grass, plastic pop bottle between her teeth.
Or else it’s a stick, twice her size. When it slows her down
she sits, chews it until it fits.
She digs in the closet, buries bones in the couch,
wonders why the old dogs who live by the park won’t race.
She swallows a sock. She chews another box.
Tongue across my face.
Woof at the back door.
Stretched under the bed,
at my feet beneath the desk,
nose at my side.
Maggie grinning.
At the foot of the bed she snaps awake.
Leaps to the floor, runs to the back door.
As soon as it opens she is gone. Up the hill, into the woods,
into the night, giving chase to what I cannot see, cannot hear.
If I say nine hundred names for Maggie she would still be Dog.
— Kathy Jennings
Remember
If I remember the farm
with a glow it may be
because we didn’t make a living
there, we simply lived there,
played there mostly,
in the hayloft, in the pigeon-house, in the barnyard
where the weeds grew tall enough to hide in standing up.
We played school in the chicken coop.
We played princess in the yard, where the ladies in waiting
served crushed leaves, with crushed red poison berries,
bark and dirt, we called it coo-coo-kah-kah,
consumed it with the smacking lips of pretend eating.
We rearranged the hay bales in the hayloft.
At the edge of the cornfield we stood to watch the Spaniel’s ears flip
as he went springing through the rows.
We found arrowheads in the dirt.
Before we had the run of the barnyard
there were cows.
We stood, feet hooked
on the white picket fence
and watched them, wondering
what would happen if we flapped
a red towel at them. They didn’t stay
inside their fence, and they left
giant, fly attracting pies, in the front yard,
and the back and side. We picked Queen Anne’s lace,
put it in bottles with water and food coloring
and watched it change.
We caught a snake, sealed it in a jar and counted
every time his tongue poked out.
We pulled the legs from Daddy Long Legs. We screamed
when the dog found the voles in the sleeping bag and ate them.
We learned to stay away from the wild cats, at least I did after
I found a nest of kittens, held one, then dropped it on its head.
We had a baby-sitter named Lois who had the buckest teeth
in the world and we treated her mean,
even though she read Raggedy Anne books to us.
There was a closet that connected
our bedroom with mom and dad’s,
When they were gone we ran
through it, pretending we were escaping
through a secret tunnel. The maple tree
outside our room was a thinking tree
and I climbed as high as I could go, up
to the thinnest branches
when I needed to figure out mothers
who stayed in bed all day. She said last week
she was angry when she found out my aunt explained
it all when I was eleven.
“We tried so hard to protect you from all that.”
We knew, we always knew.
I don’t know if she remembers
that the morning glories climbed the house.
Every spring day we woke
to the comforting coo of mourning doves.
— Kathy Jennings
Independence Day
Why is it is easier somehow to write
of death and betrayal
of heat and light
and water boiled?
Easier than the hushed moments
of rain without thunder.
In the afternoon my father clears
brush away, cuts each stick to pieces,
places them into the green barrel.
My mother sits on the porch
on a plastic lawn chair,
making up songs for small children.
I sit in the mud and pull weeds,
soak myself in the sprinkler,
uproot the Glads when I move the hose.
Father and I debate whether the dying Ginko can be saved.
I show him I have planted the Cannas that were his father’s favorite.
Mother asks if the line she has written is too tricky for little ones.
I shower her with kisses and it almost makes her cry.
Later, we grill brats and burgers,
pile our plates with pasta and potato salads
a cool breeze of quiet contentments blows down off the trees
beyond the house as we eat enough for us and my sisters
at the other ends of the country,
getting ready for fireworks
and the symphony.
— Kathy Jennings
January 20, 2010 at 12:31 pm
My heart…