Live Encounters Poetry & Writing September 2024
Another Old Movie, poems by Jordan Smith.
The Black Canvas Jacket
That her father always pulled on
When he walked the trail
Into the vly behind the house
She’d grown up in, then
Scrambled down the wooded bluff
Toward the creek, clutching the maple
Saplings and catching his fall
Until he reached the old road, barely
Anything of the two ruts left
As it followed the Dwaas Kill past
Some posted land no one’d farmed
In years and entered the marsh
Where he’d walk, heel-and-toe
As the footpath dwindled to tussocks
And along the plank catwalk to sit with binoculars
In an abandoned duck blind, watching
For any hawk and the redwings that dog-
Fought it away from their nests, their sharp
Black bodies and cries, as they dived,
The flame-orange blazons
On their shoulders like an RAF
Insignia on a Spitfire, until even the big
Redtails soared off with a sort of shrug
Toward the higher ground
He’d just descended, and he’d smoke
A pipe of dry Latakia tobacco
To keep the mosquitos off
And sip from the flask of scotch
He carried in one inside pocket
(In the other, a notebook and stub
Pencil) work gloves jammed beside
His baseball cap in the game
Pouch of the black canvas jacket
That she saw was missing from the hook
Although the binoculars
Were still on the shelf, and she thought
They had agreed the descent
Was too steep for him and the footing
At the ford untrustworthy
For a man in his seventies, even
With the hobnail logger’s boots
He’d saved from his time
With the CCC in Bandelier,
When he was almost charged
With desertion for wandering
Up Frijoles Canyon, climbing
The cliff face with his sketchbook
To copy the designs on the shards
Of pottery on a house floor,
Spirals he could not stare at long
Enough for how they moved
His mind towards the ragged
Canyon rims and circling
Birds, too far to see if they were
Raptors or scavengers, and at this
Distance, he thought, it hardly
Mattered, he hardly mattered,
Only the decorations on the splinters
Of clay, one of which he kept
In the pocket of his black
Canvas jacket, the jet streak
Of jagged lightning
Not even a bit worn from all the times
His thumb had traced it,
A talisman against whatever fear
Might take him at last,
And when she saw it on the butcher-
Block table near the back door
And that he’d left his journal
There and even the flask, she knew
How little he had ever asked
Of her, and that this was the one
Favor she would have to grant
And she sat down to wait
For him not to come home.
Another Old Movie
There was always a wireless playing a few rooms down the hall
(It’s been years since the years when you lived in places like this),
Opera or jazz or baseball.
A thin door. A lock that opens with a shake. It’s too easy.
You’re already inside where you shouldn’t be,
Checking if your horn is in the closet, your hornrims on the table,
The round oak table with a paisley cloth,
Where tubes glow on the Philco, the turntable spins, the stylus bumps against the label,
Bix or Bessie or Benny, Rose or Rudy or Red.
In the next room, on the nightstand, a movie magazine, a syringe.
No one is ever as alone as you expect them to be.
Years ago, and if you’ve thought of her at all
It was as the starlet in the film’s next-to-last scene, the one
Just before you walk away clean, humming a song, some standard
That hasn’t been written yet, though you’re sure you’ve heard it before.
Leonard Cohen in Heaven
Nurses a Second Espresso and Finds
Neither the darkness of his late songs that welcomed darkness,
Nor the famous whiteness of his room on Hydra,
Promise of love’s erasure.
Only the familiar taste of a double expresso each morning, and another,
Black black coffee, bone-white cup,
As if there was anything to wake from.
The coffee is as good as he might have hoped, had he hoped at all.
And the two buskers, sisters, on R. St. Catherine, sing a song about R. St. Catherine
He takes as sign of god’s unpredictable kindness.
Had he thought of god as an object of hope, even then
He would not have expected the pleasure of a table in an empty café,
Through the window, the winter light of Montreal,
Or to reencounter love as he knew it, as he knew
The entrance to the Metro, late at night, and no telling
Who will be on the car.
And the next day, nothing to do with the morning but sip coffee and write
As he had once when there was no one at all to listen to the song
He had not thought would be a song until it was.
© 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.