Holding Company Read online

  Holding

  Company

  Major Jackson

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  For

  James Welden Romare Jackson

  and

  in memory of

  my mother

  Gloria Ann Matthews

  Contents

  Your Hourglass & No One Else to Blame

  Picket Monsters

  Creationism

  Going to Meet the Man

  White Power

  Mondes en Collision

  Migration

  After Riefenstahl

  Roof of the World

  Discrete Intelligence

  Greek Revival

  Said the Translator

  Jane Says

  Lost Lake

  I Had the Craziest Dream

  Life During Wartime

  Dynagroove

  Hysteresis

  Exquisite Minutes

  Tremble

  You, who carry daylight on your face

  Unteachable Rain

  New Sphere of Influence

  Towers

  Anthrodrome

  Poem Beginning with a Line by Dante Rossetti

  Heaven Goes Online

  Thinking of Lucretius

  Aubade

  Speaking East Coast

  The Nature of Affairs

  At the Club

  Strangers Are Not Strangers

  On Removing the Wedding Band

  Superfluities

  Headfirst

  The Chase

  How You Love

  Club Revival

  Quaff

  Bedraggled

  More Feeling

  Caressing the Ruins

  Jewel-Tongued

  Manna

  Bereft

  Shortbus

  Hookups

  Breakups

  Early Spring

  Roadblocks

  Digging Holes

  Delicious. I love you. Goodbye.

  The Door I Open

  Therapy

  Far Out West

  When you go away

  Designer Kisses

  Fever

  Observe His Face

  Homecoming

  Lorca in Eden

  Myth

  An Empire of Hand-Holding & Park Benches

  Autumn Landscape

  My Awe Is a Weakness

  Headstones

  Immanence

  Recondite

  Prayer

  On the Manner of Addressing Shadows

  Overwrought Power Ballad

  Narcissus

  Lying

  The Giant Swing Ending in a Split

  Treat the Flame

  Periplum

  My Face in the ATM Screen

  Maithuna

  Here the Sea

  Brash and Ambitious

  Leave It All Up to Me

  Zucchini

  Forecast

  Notes

  About the Author

  … one muse, one music, had one the luck—

  lost in the dark night of the brilliant talkers.

  —Robert Lowell, on T. S. Eliot

  Then

  once those expressionistic candles have been lit

  at the altars of sex, I’ll return to religion.

  .

  .

  .

  and finally I’ll reveal my true passion:

  Which is life raging [or unwilling] [or dying]

  —and thus, again poetry:

  neither the sign nor the existing thing matters.

  — Pier Paolo Pasolini,

  Plan of Future Works

  Holding

  Company

  Your Hourglass & No One Else to Blame

  Picket Monsters

  For I was born, too, in the stunted winter of History.

  For I, too, desired the Lion’s mouth split

  & the world that is not ours, and the wounded children

  set free to their turnstiles of wonder. I, too, have

  blinked speechless at the valleys of corpses, wished

  Scriabin’s “Black Mass” in the Executioner’s ear,

  Ellington in the Interrogation Room.

  I now seek gardens where bodies have their will,

  where the self is a compass point given to the lost.

  Let me call your name; the ground here is soft & broken.

  Creationism

  I gave the bathtub purity and honor, and the sky

  noctilucent clouds, and the kingfisher his implacable

  devotees. I gave salt & pepper the table, and the fist

  its wish for bloom, and the net, knotholes of emptiness.

  I gave the loaf its slope of integrity, the countertop

  belief in the horizon, and mud its defeated boots.

  I gave morning triumphant songs which consume my pen,

  and death its grief which is like a midsummer thunderclap.

  But I did not give her my tomblike woe though it trembled

  from my white bones and shook the walls of our home.

  Going to Meet the Man

  As if one day, a grand gesture of the mind, an expired

  subscription to silence, a decision raw as a concert

  of habaneros on the lips, a renewal to decency like a trash

  can smashing a storefront or shattering the glass face

  of a time clock: where once a man forced to the ground,

  a woman spread-eagled against a wall, where a blast into

  the back of an unarmed teen: finally, a decisive spark,

  the engine of action, a civilian standoff: on one side,

  a barricade of shields, helmets, batons, and pepper spray:

  on the other, a cocktail of fire, all that is just and good.

  White Power

  As it happened, I was twirling a cauliflower floret,

  lost in Lewis’s wardrobe of pallid trees,

  considering my country’s longing for homogenized milk

  & bags of tube socks from Walmart,

  which felt cancerous. What came to me like a surprise

  snowfall in the soft evening of a snow globe,

  one has to pinch salt and sprinkle in the palm,

  repeatedly, especially when the temperature in mother’s trailer

  has begun to drop. In this way, after your Constitution fades,

  you’ve your own hourglass and no one else to blame.

  Mondes en Collision

  To the question of history’s tectonic drift,

  Immanuel Velikovsky removed his glasses & pinched

  his temples before a silent throng at the Royal

  Hypnagogic Society in Edmonton. Through a window,

  coppiced trees blurred. An orange-headed thrush

  fleetingly invaded his sight. Someone coughed.

  Despair fell into despair, building its music. The abrupt clash

  of meaning was like the laughter of running children.

  He saw the microphone’s convexed portals as one

  of many recognizable texts out of our celestial holes.

  Migration

  That summer, municipality was on everyone’s lips,

  even the earth eaters who put the pastor in pastoral.

  Truth is my zeal for chicory waned, and my chest was damp.

  I shivered by a flagpole, knowing betrayal

  was coming my way. Just the same, I believed like a guitar string

  believes in distance and addressed each bright star Lord

  of My Feet. A country of overnight deputies, everyone had a knot

  to endeavor. I read oaks and poplars for signs: charred branches,

  tobacco leav
es strung up to die, swamp soil in my soul. Ever trace

  the outline of a phantom mob, even if you were late arriving?

  After Riefenstahl

  The screen’s fabrications remain. A film

  shot never fails, sailing through the century

  like a black V at the hour of moaning.

  I premiere these pontifical birds: villagers march

  and raise their arms, Marschlieder. Thus I am

  your sweet messenger glittering more than first stars,

  a harvest of light concealing your nicks and little deaths.

  My comrade, my camera, my power, my fury,

  my triumph, my will: do you not also,

  my love, flicker in a cathedral of terror?

  Roof of the World

  I live on the roof of the world among the aerial

  simulacra of Things, among the faded: old tennis shoes,

  vanished baseballs, heartbreak gritted with dirt. My mind

  flickers like lightning in a cloud. I’m networked

  beholding electric wires and church spires.

  I lean forward and peer at the suffering below—

  Sartre said: man is condemned to be free.

  I believe in the dead who claim to believe in me—

  says, too, the missing and forgotten. Day darkens

  on. I hear our prayers rising. I sing to you, now.

  Discrete Intelligence

  Hotels take up where bedrooms leave off.

  Crucifixes find their way above senate bills.

  A one-sided temper precedes a major pact.

  Belowstairs cowers beneath abovestairs.

  Meanwhile ghettos torment our nightsheets.

  Presidential invasion escalates insurgencies.

  A mistress puts on gloves and holds her breath.

  Then the follow-up, we’re adamant about dreamless

  days, the all-out assault on ambiguity,

  the tee-off, the golf swing, the far-look away.

  Greek Revival

  Of that unhurried blink of eyelids I glimpsed, all pixilated

  and grains, belonging to a woman dying, on screen

  her life winding down, yet one last cinematic glance

  in the prime like a loose smile filling the frame

  over a shoulder, I say so much lateral interpolations fasten us

  to that sequence of flowers as sped-up funerals. I thought

  this stepping up in the Garden District to a streetcar.

  The avenue has rituals: the curved horizon of Southern

  mansions, and the gripping anguish of oak branches reaching

  through half-opened windows like desperate fingers.

  Said the Translator

  Plato would be easier, said the translator, and thus began

  the factory tour. One had to understand the language

  of AstroTurf dotted with cannons or the nonalcoholic joy

  subway-watching women two-finger designer eyewear

  firmly up the bridge, all that rollicking uncertainty

  like a root beer. Who cares about splitting hairs

  when what’s at stake is merely the history of robes?

  The clock read 12:13, exactly when no seven were alike,

  yet, give him a pencil and the knotholes of other mouths

  make a soft hollow noise. All he knows is what he thinks.

  Jane Says

  I only know they want me, prone to stupefaction

  at the ambivalence of men. The house is sleeping,

  but she’s flipping through American Spirits,

  the canned laughter of heroin nights. Her oneiric

  fades: prairie grass bending away, barnyard decay,

  red-checkered tableware, summer running liquid

  air, languorous lift of an American flag, her grandparents

  waving, her faded duffle bag, the Irish setter

  spiraling in circles. A patrol car paints more tattoos,

  and out of silence, they move, too, like green vines.

  Lost Lake

  A soggy brightness at the northernmost ridge

  of the Tahkenitch, even nearing dusk and not

  a Domino’s for miles. I said holy at a coniferous wall

  of western hemlock overhead and red cedar

  which rose up from the foot of that coastal creek

  bearing its image and all around. I had not known

  I’d come as a witness. The great Pacific rolled in

  news from distant shores beyond a stretch of dune

  trails behind us. White-winged gulls shrieked

  and flapped at our misery frothing in waves.

  I Had the Craziest Dream

  Never on Sunday she said and brandished

  an oval locket of hairs from each

  of her lovers. I looked over my shoulders.

  We sat munching on puffs of dried hydrangea

  that no surprise tasted of cotton candy.

  Far off on the sea, on a floating bench,

  my mother excitedly talked up the president.

  I questioned his killing clothes, and knew it all perishable

  at any moment. The pictures were hanging themselves.

  Along our coastline. Best she said to hammer in the morning.

  Life During Wartime

  But the daydream collapses and time returns us

  to corners where young boys expire

  like comets at the suburbs of your thalamus.

  Gunshots weaken the houses; hope vanishes

  like old cell phones. Blood darkens a stoop;

  the mouth is disagreeable. But then, one afternoon,

  a sunshower baptizes shadows on a street. The steaming

  scent of wet sidewalks swells your insides

  and somewhere not far from here a young girl grabs

  the hand of a boy and runs over the rubble.

  Dynagroove

  Our social clock had gone berserk but those

  groovy Eames and collectible lamps licensed

  us to practice a kind of savage civility. Our vice

  wasn’t noble or the avalanche of cocktails

  with serene names suggestive of spy movies

  or the imprudent idea of going further in snow.

  We secretly wished for living rooms with such large

  cushions. We might have survived it all, especially

  the piñata beatings of effigies in foreign deserts we had

  no idea existed. Even the bongos promised Heaven.

  Hysteresis

  The chancellor leaning in the chaise

  thought, “In the old days we liked to eat well.”

  The wood-paneled room conjured greater wistfulness

  swell enough for him to finger an inside pocket

  for a phantom cigar which he lit to an Edwardian blaze,

  surprised to find his mind more than a night machine

  sputtering pearls. He missed the old chaps at the club,

  a fit citizenry if ever there were one. All is changed:

  everywhere patterns in the dark-grain

  swirling their exotic typhoons.

  Exquisite Minutes

  When we are separated on two train platforms,

  the other’s antithesis for the 7:20 Express,

  think of it as some angel-liberating moment

  sans the putrid swoosh of subway air.

  The radio struggles to neaten its long wave ban.

  Its susceptibility to seraphic interference

  reveals the white fractures of our bare intelligence.

  Yet some of us arrive capable of reading

  the clanks of tracks, lights in a tunnel,

  the arrival of birds in underground channels.

  Tremble

  My neighbor is velvety and kicks serious game.

  So sweet garlic refuses to hang tight

  in his mouth. He pulls women to his wide chest

  each time as if he’s won the Lotto. He rocks

  the
m gently and gentler. My neighbor

  is a master spooner. He knows not of desire, but only

  the rules of engagement. He says, I miss

  having Skype on all night so I can listen

  to your breathing. He floats in his museum,

  of gams, drifting from frame to frame.

  You, who carry daylight on your face

  You, who carry daylight on your face

  the best of us all, the sky is lust,

  and stills my zippered spine. Observe my envy

  of the sea where you wade, its surface

  like an afternoon of swordplay.

  You shun the lips of infants disguised as men.

  Young girls cherish the mirrors where you

  quickly collect yourself. The neighbors

  know your comings and goings, but the syntax

  of your smiles is revealed only to little children.

  Unteachable Rain

  New Sphere of Influence

  This is the year I’ll contemplate the fire-fangled sky

  over the isle of Pag, authored by my lover’s eyes.

  A crimson rambler uncurls its petals, and I am whistling

  a dusty concerto, “Hope with Roadside Wildflowers.”

  I want to unfurl in the sodden fields of her daydreams.

  Who wants immortality if she must die?

  Once I thought stars were everlasting, only dying

  behind a cerulean curtain, cloudy rains at dawn.

  My lover’s lips are twin geniuses. I’ve trashed the movie stubs

  of my past. I’ve front row seats to her mumbling sleep.

  Towers

  I could give your palace more glass shine,

  facing eastward every year without knowing.

  And no, it’s not convincing waking in fog and rain,

  steel and stone soaring above the living. After many

  springs, streets accrue their grief, and the people

  are nameless. I broadcast my hunger,

  heartwood beneath skin radiant as coronas—

  what’s there: son of tenderness, son of disasters.