Live Encounters Poetry & Writing Volume Four November-December 2024
The Ghost in the Mix Tape, poems by Jordan Smith.
The Ghost in the Mix Tape
For Liam Rector
Abba up against Sinatra, the Pogues, the Pretenders,
Or Lenya or Marianne Faithfull or Yeats,
Or Eliot reading Gerontion,
Mailed out of nowhere.
You who meant to save us all from our lesser selves,
Precise and florid, frank and hilarious
Beyond decorum,
How could I have thought your spirit would stay in the shadows,
Telling the same sad story over and over?
Terminal Shipping
Baltimore, summer 1979
He liked to call her at work in the afternoons,
When the colleague next door he hardly saw
Whose matched pair of champion Viszlas
Pulled down the office curtains
Leaping about for the hell of it
Finally got off the phone line they shared,
And his last conference was another no-show,
And their apartment was blocks away, sweltering,
Crammed with their boxes half-packed
For another new start in another September,
Just to hear her answer Terminal Shipping
In her voice that barely carried over the teletype
And if it was easier to imagine her in another
Coffee house in another church basement in another life
Or another decade, and not in the warehouse district
Watching from the sixth floor the forklifts shuffle
The containers, and the flat tar roofs of Fells Point,
When she told him about the scents of cinnamon,
Nutmeg and coriander from the McCormack factory
You could smell all the way to Bolton Hill
Where Scott and Zelda lived, or Mount Washington
And the string quartet busking outside the conservatory,
And the Quebecois cook who jumped ship, holed up
In a five-star hotel, ordering haute cuisine
From room service and charging it to the company
Since they couldn’t sail without him, and no one
Knew what to do to get him back in the galley
While the phones lit up, and even if it was another
Dull hot day, and even if she didn’t have much to say,
It was still her voice, tinged with that other world
She always opened for him.
Sometimes, Late
He tunes the top two fiddle strings down a step
So he can feel the century-old wood
Wake from its tempered sleep
Into the night world of drones until there is another pitch, a distant
Unnamable overtone, and the tunes–
Blind Dog, Blackest Crow—
Are beyond choice, are wind in the darkness, are a radio, drifting
To one of those stations he might have caught
Driving at night in the hills above the lakes, every commercial signal out of range,
Even the talk shows, but then a few notes, a few more,
The cheap speakers in his borrowed car crackling,
And a squeal of static as if his bow slipped
From his hand, as it did in those first gigs
When he was still drinking in the old inn
On North Main, the main room gutted
Down to lathe and plaster, gypsum dust on the dance floor,
The dancers’ steps leaving traces
Like the streaks in the almost-antique cloud chamber
In the corner of the physics lab, before the draft ended
And he dropped out, hitched around the Finger Lakes
For a summer, picking up work in the vineyards
And marinas and the fiddle by ear from a handful
Of 78s he found in a junk shop and a housemate
Who sat on the porch and played even into fall, and said
If you ever need a friend, a fiddle is your best shot as he retuned
The high strings down, and that’s what he remembers
Now that the inn is a bistro and the dancers in their boots
And long dresses crossing the floor are the figures of nothing but the memory
In the bowhand’s flex and drawl as if keeping time
Were anything but that.
© Jordan Smith
Jordan Smith is the author of eight full-length books of poems, most recently Little Black Train, winner of the Three Mile Harbor Press Prize and Clare’s Empire, a fantasia on the life and work of John Clare from The Hydroelectric Press, as well as several chapbooks, including Cold Night, Long Dog from Ambidextrous Bloodhound Press. The recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim and Ingram Merrill foundations, he is the Edward Everett Hale Jr., Professor of English at Union College.
Jordan Smith’s poems are always beautiful, always mysterious. Can’t get enough of them. Liam Rector clearly made a tear in the poet’s heart. His ghost makes regular appearances in the work. What a loss, when such a mind brings an end to itself.
When it comes to unearthing lost memories, forgotten emotions and experiences, Jordan Smith, as the bard put it, can “call spirts from the vasty deep.” And they come.