By MAJOR JACKSON
Each day I forget something, but happy
I never forget to wake
to the bright corollas of summer
mornings. I quietly lay in the jury
box of my bed and listen to
the counter-arguments of birds grow
to sweet clamors. I know, like me,
someone sitting at a kitchen table
in my neighborhood is taking down notes
between bites of granola and gentle sips
of oolong tea and recording
their loud trills. The pen is her large
antenna to the mysteries which come
in alternate currents of slapstick
and calamity. She slowly writes away
her nights of emptiness and boredom.
We’d be perfect in a Bergman film,
both of us slowly entering into day
seeking the final appearance of things.
A delivery truck backs into a drive-way.
The streets begin their warm breathing.
Major Jackson is the author of three collections of poetry: Holding Company, Hoops, and Leaving Saturn, winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. He is a recipient of a Whiting Writer’s Award and has been horoed by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress. Jackson is the Richard Dennis Green and Gold Professor at University of Vermont and a core faculty member of the Bennington Writing Seminars. He serves as the poetry editor of the Harvard Review.
