{ Richard Jackson: Loose Lips Sink Ships. }

[delga]

Loose Lips Sink Ships
by Richard Jackson

At the end of each line, the door left open
just a crack—and I'm out of there—at least until
Jackson comes back with a fresh cup of coffee.
He's got this thing, you know, where he's
trying to pin a few of his more complicated
emotions for me to wear on my sleeve.
I tell you, being a character in one of his poems is
like being the sort of person who'd get
thrown out of a mental hospital
for depressing the other patients. So here I am,
having taken a cue from a line by Goethe—
"If I really knew myself, I'd run away,"—
that I happened to be walking next to
a few drafts back while we were scribbling
our way towards some minor part in a great
war or disaster, I forget which one.
I mean, a poem has to account for its untied
shoelaces as well as its extermination camps.
I remember that Oscar Wilde quote that no one
wanted to keep time with: "All bad poetry,"
he says, "springs from genuine feelings."
That's why just as you start to solve
for x in one problem, a whole militia
of unspeakable thoughts signs up in another.
What it really comes down to is a question
of strategy and persuasion. For example,
I see this woman who'd been written out of a
youthful poem of Jackson's and she sits down—this is
really happening for once—she sits down for a few
drafts of stout at the Big River Bar that's always in
the back of Jackson's head. I want this ravishing love
poem. She does, too. She starts to cry. Me too.

And then what happens? Jackson steps back and
soon he has me telling her about some halfmile wide
asteroid this astronomer in Pisa says will hit us in 2022
and she starts to look away. A whole decade falls
to its knees like a rejected lover. Sure, it's easy
to bury Hope somewhere in the impact zone. Yeah, and
impact zones, that leads him to thinking about the war
how everywhere you look, the endless ditches are still
waiting for their firing squads. I'm still waiting for
the woman to find her way back into the poem
as he sometimes will let her. And he's still writing
about the people throwing rocks across the riverbed

of hate in some obscure town in Kosovo.
A hawk makes off with the neighbors' kitten.
A crow dodges History by the side of the road.
What am I supposed to do with those details?
The moon that was frozen in a mudpuddle
a week ago has already been bailed out.
It doesn't do any good to blame his prolix nature.
The moment's lost, I can see that better than I can
see the last erasures of that woman. Too much celluloid
in the thinking. Not enough bulking up in the heart.
How can you tell what's really important? Take
the detail about the asteroid, —was that important?

We're important, is what the woman whispers
from the other page, now that we have this history,
this poem of our very own, whose early versions,
unseen by either of us, owe so much to
the glorious reign of Charlemagne who ruled
that the arts and writing ought to be fostered
throughout his empire, and not just in monasteries,
and so led to to more secular writing, then the love
poems of Petrach, Dante, Wyatt all the way down
to the very sort of thing we both wanted several
lines back. Jesus, I'm thinking, she even sounds
like Jackson. All I wanted to do was touch
her heart with my fingertips. Now everything
I've said will be taken out with the trash.
That's why the scarecrows of feeling are always
trying on my clothes. I can hear him, Jackson,
fumbling with the coffee pot now, mumbling
how the birds at his feederit's not his really,
but his wife's, can no longer hold off the night,
that darkness falls around us all like dead leaves
into the pond, that the vapor trail you see against
the moon is just the night's aorta dissolving.
Give me a break. The thing is he's trying to force
the poem, wax poetic, use those personifications
and euphemisms that hide what he really wants
to say.

Too much politically correct language is
what I say. I mean, you have to ignore those
people that tell us how all women are
"domestic incarceration survivors," and that
as a man—I wonder if he thinks of me as his
feminine side? that, well I am supposedly
a "sexual terrorist" or better, a "genetically
oppressive exploiter." And Jackson: let's not
describe him except to say he "posseses an
alternative body image." Yeah, right.
And get this while we're on the subject of language:
it's not that certain people do evil but that they are
"ethically challenged." Back here, War is still
hanging out in the pool halls of endless arbitration,
but smoking a better brand of cigarettes. Jesus,
I'm sounding like him. And then, pretty soon
the woman returns, but she's a girl now,
in Bosnia, where our correct new language lets us see
a few night workers busy with "genetic cleansing,"
a few "small caliber delivery systems"
"servicing" several thousand "soft targets"
which turn out, as often ahppens, to be flesh.
That is why it's just a question of physics
that helps the sniper in Bihac determine at what moment
to squeeze off a round, given x, the hill's angle of incline,
and y, the initial speed of the girl's sled,
and precisely how far the pieces of her lung will scatter
in front of her, and how long it will take the sled
to cross their path. And then it is just a question
of equal and opposite reactions when Revenge
breaks into some armory.

I don't know how
to get back to where we began or if I can just
will what his imagination doesn't see. Marco Polo
mistook a rhino for a unicorn because that's what
he wanted to see. The need to find a unicorn
nearly consumed the middle ages. Now we are
looking for invisible planets we think we know
by the ways certain stars wobble through history.
Which is why it is impossible, simply impossible
to know if we are as alone as we feel. At one time
we were all just a few elements caged inside
the same star. Now they've opened the cages
but set the dogs on our hopes. Hope—forgive me,
and it seems impossible but while the bodies stacked up
in Auschwitz the flowers outside continued to bloom,
the lovers in the orchard beyond crumbled into one another
like burning newspapers.

Maybe loneliness is why
characters like me exist, and the fact that so many make
their little cameos right here is proof enough. Take
Jackson's friend Eva Toth, written out of the last draft,
who taunted a few Russian soldiers in Budapest, 1956,
and might have spent the next few years clutching
the bars of despair's cell, if her more realistic friend
hadn't pulled her away. She was the one that told him about
Estergom, the first seat of the Hungarian Kings
—they showed up in Jackson's earliest doodlings—,
not too far from the little town of Abda where
the poet Miklos Radnoti, who tried desperately to make
a language of love from barbed wire and clouds, from stars
and blood, ended a forced march from his prison camp in Bor,
Yugoslavia, sometime in late 1944, shot and dumped
in a ditch without a coffin.

Did you know that
originally coffins were nailed shut to keep the dead in
and not worms out, the people then being so superstitious
they sometimes cut holes in the side of the house and
snuck the coffin out, taking a circuitous route
to the cemetery so the spirit couldn't find its way
back home. So —what's the point? Jackson will
have me talking about the history of embalming,
the garden cemetery movement in 19th century America,
even the present dayclub in Vienna for "The Vertically
Buried Ones," because I'm starting to see how death is
really a metaphor for all our relationships, after all,
and for anything we try to know— like that image
he wrote about the stargazer, an Asian fish with eyes
on top of its head, never looking at the earth,
hiding in sand until it stirs up a silt cloud and
swallows its prey whole. Not bad, really—
Why are my best ideas surfacing just as he returns?

Here he is again, dribbling his coffee down his chin
and onto one of those Tshirts he wears with catchy
foreign words, and he's been moody lately because
he's been remembering how when Rachel mentioned
Bill's death at the bar, the past came spraying down
like one of those asteroids breaking up, like him really
too unconsolable to mention here, so that he sat down finally
to write this poem not about Bill, or death, or even love,
which are so impossible, or even about the nothing that approaches
us at so many miles per second, but simply about a loneliness
that finds itself surrounded by infinite atoms of desire,
that trembles the heart like a branch the bird has abandoned.
So here I am in the middle of life's—poetry's—little interstate,
and this woman's given up on me because she wants to be
in Jackson's elegy too. All I have are a few stranded lines:
how my bed does not contain her, how each star reflects
her world on its forehead, how impossiblly true it is
that daylight ferments in the flowers while she sleeps,
that the house cricket can go on singing even when she is
away. What does it all mean? I'm tired. Let's stop all this.
"Boy Meets Girl, So What?" wrote Bertolt Brecht.
Wait, I didn't put that there.You can blame Jackson.
He's starting to compare this messy poem to his life.
"If brains were shit," he's starting to write,
and I can't stop him, "your bird cage would be clean."

Comments

[twincy.livejournal.com]

So, tell me about this guy. He's frustratingly ungooglable and this and everything else you posted = I love him unreasonably much already.

[delgaserasca.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's pretty frustrating - I know nothing about him except his poems. I'm trying to get my hands on a collection and doing fairly abysmally on that score.

I love everything of his that I've read, though. Antigone Today is probably my favourite.