Sorry for the blurry photo—it was taken in a moving car at 5 in the morning—but if you squint it looks like an abstract painting, rather pretty.)
Alaska With Jess
by Jacqueline Zeisloft
Whipping past black spruces and whites ones, too
we weave; fast enough for falling thistles
not to land in our hair.
I am not cold
But you are.
Little complainer, I love you.
A scarf in August, shielding your soft face,
blinding you to the mountains
where I imagine we are going.
Everyone else is inside
Reading fantasy or eating soup.
The back carriage is open
To three blunt sides, as I grip
the railing and your small hand.
They say it’s twice the size of Texas.
I say we sleep in the dining car
and grow up on the rails.
Together.
Hello 2019, and in with the new, as they say. In this case, a new poet, a young woman I met at a book launch whose friend “outed” her to me as a poet. I told her I’d post one of her poems if she sent me a few, so here’s a big hearty welcome to “Alaska With Jess,” the first Poem Elf post of the year.
“Alaska With Jess” eluded me the first few times I read it. Some poems are like shy people, they need patience and time. You can’t just keep lobbing questions—What does this mean? Why this?—you have to allow the poem to unfold on its own terms.
Which it did, serendipitously. Christmas Eve on the way to the airport, poem in hand, trying to place it before the year was out, in the early cold morning in the back seat of an Uber, just my son and me beginning an adventure, our near and dear left behind and asleep, I was suddenly struck that I was living out a smaller version of the poem.
Experiencing a poem on a visceral level is a wondrous thing. Reading over the poem in the dark by light of my cell phone as we sped down the highway, I felt the excitement of the poem’s speaker as she imagines the huge mountains ahead. I looked over at my sleepy son and flushed with the tenderness she feels towards the young child in her charge who she has taken to the back of the train to showcase the view.
The speaker has made the choice of adventure over coziness. Those inside the train are settled with their soup and books. Those outside see what’s moving past, and in their mind’s eye they see the scenery ahead. Isn’t this just the thing for a new year, this gift of the young? Over and over they bring us to the world. Over and over we beg them to make life new again. There they are, perched on the back of the train, seeing what we don’t and bubbling over with excitement. How we need that.
Born in LaGrange, Illinois in 1995, poet Jacqueline Zeisloft dreamed of becoming a country music star until she decided to get her degree in English Lit at Belmont University in Nashville. Her most important influence is 20th century Scottish poet WS Graham (I’m going to look him up). She’s also inspired by Adrienne Rich, Walt Whitman, Naomi Shihab Nye, Frank O’Hara, Seamus Heaney, Sappho, e.e. cummings and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. She’s especially taken with the Beat poets.
So young, so full of creative energy and talent. Keep travelling, Jacqueline. Keep seeing the world with such excitement, and keep reporting back.
Happy New Year, everyone!
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[From the Department of Shameless Plugging and also the Department of Anti-Out-With-the Old: The book launch I mentioned above was for a book my daughter Rosemary co-edited with the dare-I-say venerable Tom McGrath, frequent commentator on this blog. Sharing the Wisdom of Time is an inspiring collection of interviews with elderly people across the world, from all walks of life, from Martin Scorsese to a blind basket weaver in Kenya. The accompanying photographs are gorgeous—each face tells its own story. The interviews cover subjects like love, work, struggle, faith, and death, and they’re all short, so you can dip in now and then and read a few whenever the need for wisdom, perspective and kindness hits. It’s a book for everyone, a beautiful reminder that what we humans have in common far outweighs what divides us. You can purchase from Loyola Press here or, for Amazon shoppers, here.]
Jane Hirshfield was born in 1953 in New York City. After graduating from the first Princeton class to include women, she moved to San Francisco to study Zen Buddhism for eight years. She’s published eight books of poetry and, as a translator of Japanese poetry, helped popularize tanka in the United States. She’s won numerous awards and taught at many universities including Stanford, Duke and Univerisity of Virginia.
But they couldn’t hold back on their wedding day, the glow, the big smiles, the “reflected joy” in the mirror of their eyes, the affectionate touching whenever the other was near. This overflowing of love from a couple who have known each other since their teenage years was a living, breathing exhibition of Cavafy’s words.
Constantine Petrou Cavafy is Greece’s most highly esteemed modern poet even though he lived only briefly in Greece. He was born in 1863 in Egypt to Greek parents, the youngest of nine children. After the death of his father, the family fell into poverty and moved to England. There he spent most of his childhood. More financial distress pulled the family to Greece, then back to Egypt, where Cavafy worked as a journalist and as a stockbroker. But the bulk of his professional life was spent at a government agency.
Thomas Hornsby Ferril (1986-1988) was born in Denver and lived out his very long life there, eventually becoming poet laureate of his home state. His poems can be found in the Colorado capitol building, poem fragments engraved under each of eight murals in the rotunda.
Naomi Shihab Nye was born in 1952 in St. Louis and identifies as an Arab-American. Her father was a Palestinian refugee and her mother American. During high school she lived for some time with her grandmother in Jerusalem and in San Antonio.
We’ve come a long way from the golden door. These days I’d be singing, “I lift my lamp beside the silver cage.” Or as a host on Fox News put it, “walls made of chain link fences.”
Okay it’s a little literal, putting a poem with the famous line “I know why the caged bird sings” on a cage of birds. I could have left it somewhere that highlights the metaphorical nature of “Sympathy,” say in a book about slavery or taped to a Confederate statue (hard to come by in Michigan), but I yam what I yam, as Popeye would say. Not particularly subtle.
Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906) was born in Dayton, Ohio, the child of former slaves. His mother taught him to read when he was four and always encouraged his education. His parents separated when he was a toddler, and his father, who had escaped enslavement before the end of the Civil War and fled to Massachusetts to fight for the Union, died when Dunbar was twelve.