Jordan Smith – No Expectations

He said, the record

On the old lp changer repeating

The same side, an example

If not an exact one, he acknowledged

Of what he meant, all those years ago

Still in high school, when he walked home

From the church basement coffee house

Through the suburbs to his parents’ house,

The traffic light on Route 31 strobing,

The acid just taking hold,

And he knew the night would just go on

Folding in on itself, an origami

So complex,

That when he stared at it in the mirror

On the back of his bedroom door,

Each sharply creased facet

Was another axiom,

Proving the self unprovable,

Another face

To pull on, like the oversize sweater

He wore now most nights against a chill

The whiskey couldn’t reach,

And this is why, he continued,

He decided that night he might as well give himself
Fully over to whatever came to hand
Rather than to anything scrawled on his own
Or anyone’s endless list of expectations.
Show me your loyalties,
He said, as the song began again,
Especially if you’ve kept them
As simple as I have.
When I pass through anywhere, I never want
To pass through there again.

---

The Great Uncertainty

He never thought he’d be even a footnote
In anyone’s biography, unless as one
Of those contingent circumstances
(Which, the sages wrote, are known
As the great uncertainty), like
Today’s visitation by an owl in the woods,
Which happened only because he switched
Shoes for boots, and then, discovering
A hole in his sock, took the time
To change it, and later for no reason
He could remember, he picked the direct
Rather than his usual circuitous path,
Straight up, not following the contours
Along the ascending ridges, the narrower
Less-traveled way he preferred that seemed
Suddenly predictable, self-referential,
And then the feathers like smoke, and then
On an ash branch a few feet off the trail
The horned head, and the bird’s charry
Silhouette just emerging against the trunk,
Watching him as if he should
Have more to offer, but later, when he texted
His friend about the band on stage,
The singer from whom they’d both
Learned so much about desolation
And the insufficiency of nostalgia,
Who performed now with near-
Indifference to anything like praise,
And when his friend sent back a selfie,
Holding up the singer’s rarest single
Framed in a mirror so that his face
Was just visible through the spindle hole
There seemed no reason that some
Gesture from his life might not become
A trace in someone else’s story,
What a biographer might call
A source, as if you could find any beginning
To whatever was always going to come,
Next.

---

© 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.