for David Rigsbee
Not the cheap, top-spiral-bound shirt-pocket one
With the stubby miniature golf course pencil
That he read somewhere Kerouac used,
And not the old blue-cloth-and-red-leather ledger
He found in his father’s rolltop desk, tucked sideways
In a hidden cabinet next to the pigeonholes for bills,
Pale blue ruled lines on paler paper,
Nor any of the Moleskines, tossed in the lightship basket,
Hardly used, like the fountain pen.
No, the one he chose
Was a red calendar diary from sometime in the mid-70s
Found in the open stacks in the college library,
No name and no entries, and he picked it up, tried it out,
Put it away, forgotten, until fifty years later, unpacking,
And the poems he found there dated
His imagination more precisely than he cared to admit…
The notebook, tucked neatly in a carton between Blackburn and Cavafy and Bly,
And nothing changed all that much, he thought
As he wrote this on the next blank page.
Variations on a Song of William Byrd
My mind to me a kingdom is…
What I heard wrong was the tense, heard was for is
And so I assumed a sort of self-elegy
Or a practice, as of self-abnegation, which I thought was the past (not
Nostalgia, not confessions, simply the distance at which memory is composed)
When the lyric is all present; my mind to me a kingdom is; I believed
I heard an exile’s lament, a restlessness nearly silence, and so I turned the music down,
Before I knew my error, before I recognized that kingdom was neither
What I’d thought nor what I’d thought to lose.
For the Poet Who Studied Composition
I remember the piano
In the basement studio of his suburban house,
The evening, the picture window
Opening onto the dark lawn.
When someone read another heartbroken poem,
He looked at me and winked.
If that was a lesson in irony, I hardly needed it.
If that was a lesson in candor, it barely scratched my solitude.
I was listening for the music I could almost hear.
Nothing I wrote came close.
All long poems have their slow moments,
He said when I finished reading mine.
If that was a lesson in composition, I might have paid more attention.
Somewhere upstairs, a door closed.
In the ebony gloss of the piano, he left hardly a trace.
When I remember that room, I’m not sure he was even there.
If that was a lesson at all, it suited his voice better than mine
Evening Song, Late Summer
I must sing of what I do not want (Beatriz de Dia)
I do not want the light beyond the trees
Which is a translation of the lament sung in a language
No one speaks,
Out of longing, perhaps, or because the idiom seems too clumsy
For any but the simplest losses.
I do not want to believe my own sorrows are greater
Than the blue-gray mug shattered on the kitchen tile,
Unmendable but trivial,
As I do not want to get by heart the lyric
In my rendering or any other
That keeps time by the passage of the horse’s hoof,
Since to admit there is a distance to be crossed
Is to sing that her heart and mine are not the same,
And I will not sing of what I do not want.
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, I really love “Evening Song, Late Summer.” So much can be said by denying what one feels most deeply.
Kaaren