note / worthy by Russell Jaffe
Scantily Clad Press, 2008
Fireflies, Not Birds, Not Rabbits, are reflected in the overhead. Of whose car? There is space and then there are special dimensionswhichever one is a critter. Unbeknownst to us, critters invoked. What you consider tiny –a word which excludes other words— reminds me of small birds. Their necks crane. Some long legs reach into the pond crammed with lightning bolts just as winter’s out: I did not mean to lie to you about killing animals. The lightning from a lightning bug is a chemical production, chemical green, beaker glowing. I used to smear them on my windshield. But when I was young enough to smear them, I could not drive. When I drive and park at the pond, we dream critters. Not rabbits, not birds, but a banner of critters we have shared which is draped across something. Is it light from insects? When I was very little, young enough to make banners from firefly lights over the pond, I would see rabbits in the yard. Now I see the yard as a space with special dimensions. Birds flew in and out of yards, ponds, at will
Indiana The nineteenth state, the smoke stacks. The aluminum rusting on cars. I saw a barn where cows are birthed. Nine cows are born every day. No one said how many were killed. The sign was painted red, its post molding to the ground. Wasted fields. Abandoned cars, cheap as booze glass. Your roadside pathos. Your pebbles lodged in shoes. Chicago runoff. What runs from New York to Jersey gets tangled in gardens. This is the Midwest. To Gary, jobless. 84.3% Black. 11.9% White. 2 % Native American. The 2000 census claimed it. Eight years since then, look West to crowds of people and movement, so clean. The conversations organized, Gary, your 40 is half full. The booze is cheap, but you never forget, no, booze remembers like an old bandsaw. How, how, how we used to work. Industry North. The industry picked up and went to Chicago. I said it. Damn! The cost is great. The cost is great. For what I once knew as a home or, better, in place of a home is now the ker-plunk of quarters. Roadside tolls, bored snipers, dead cops, Indianapolis bound, like
stairs surrounding the inside of a cock. Hard, pointed up, bad climb. The city’s concrete pants are stained. Bad joke. Monument to what else. The price of this garbage can is only a fish coffee odor. I am not the moment itself; I am not a great architect of language; shacks are falling down. I would like to say birds cough here. They don’t. The road pollutes itself. The oily water stains the sun. The dirt is on my tongue. Spit hands. The farm equipment rebelled a long time ago. Like veterens, they soak outside of farms and die. The blue sky is boring as fuck. The highway price is great. Other things aren’t. Indiana, I have taken to America.
And also, the things were looking at me, and yes, they were staring, yes, I crossed a number of streets into yards, yes, spilling was beer at campfires, beans in an opened can, the yards were our yards but not our property, yes! from the woods came stares. there were things looking at me from somewhere else: Yes, I thought of you. Anxiously, while people were finding sticks in the periphery, I bit my nails and thought about addiction to another person. The nails on the floor are a pit.
And also, the things were looking at me, they sprung at me, attacking. I called them trap spiders because they had so many eyes. Looking was something I thought a lot about. Doors swing open and closed. The bottom part of the spider creates a clog over which smaller things can walk. The large go after the small because of their flavors. The trap is sprung. In we go. But they are so small. It’s just like seeing the universe through a telescope, pulling back and the universe is a jar of moths, and it’s night outside anyway. Smaller than a spider, a spider worthy of study, the multi-eyed poem stares back at everyone. What it traps are small. What it builds is a home that is also a collection. These are things looking, looking, looking, 8x.
And also, the things were looking at me, development of birds, cycles, I pointed from my bike. I found a feather in oil on the ground writing (since I was a kid) are growing larger
note worthy: the sidewalks in the suburbs
And also, the things were looking at me. The type of syntax is unknown. But people have always been confusing. Their words and their words are equations and schematics. Nouns, not potatoes, not the moist floor of Spring. I’ve seen trees irrationally placed: some were spaced at exact measurements of feet from each other. The forest, faced with mathematics, turns away. We have blanketed so many things, this is our picnic. I have always been a survivalist. I am someone who loves the forest, and someone who watched mushrooms grow on logs and thought they were vegetables. But they’ve always been the opposite, haven’t they? They are living and looking –looking—the act of looking is presented as curtains which are always parting. Pursed lips, smoke, canopies of measured wood. The wood is still growing. Mushroom caps explode open and cover the ground in white ash. A beak skims the lake which has overflow(d). Fishes wriggle dead across the dirt. I refuse to be blamed for any of this.
And also, the things were looking at me, but we are losing the structure of the body, aren’t we? The fridge, stocked with food, waits while we go out to dinner again. Heavily, we stuffed our enemies into different kinds of bags labeled “foes” the compartments were nearly built. Sometimes, across the food table, we glare at each other. Our food came home with us in the end. But it was tossed in with the bags marked “friends” We are becoming crazy being told that we are. O friends! Foes! to my bags, enter. May things looking at me make neat rows. Compartments are changing things, changing like walls change, like rotting things fall from the bone, from the marrow which vanishes. The poem is hanging off the bone. Poetry, books on the shelf are in the right places, finally. If we ate meat, I’d use the bones for soup. We aren’t killers any longer. But before bed, lying, before sleep, we are left alone with our bodies. No distractions. No escaping this time. Nothing else, is there? You say I say I love to protect my own bones. My unsalted poetry composes me utterly. Thick, heavy, dished out with a ladle is the prone individual, into the bag. What I love isn’t there anymore (the body) I hate being dictated like I love being looked at and trapped.
And also, the things were looking at me, aren’t cleaned up, aren’t composed, have on oversized t shirts on a Sunday. The sky is bright gray. The bicycle is outside chained to the fence and a siren is going off nearby and growing distant. The rain is soft like a finger over a garden hose. The leaves have budded on the wood as numbers, little else. Air warm, moist settles in the folds of skin. The birds know it’s about to rain because it was just raining, it has stopped raining, the clouds are waiting for the light to change. Cars roll slightly passed the grocery store. One chirps a little. I am concerned you aren’t being looked after.
Becky is sick, Becky is sick, I know she is. Her heart is in a glass. This is one of the things, one which grows, things sideways, things up and down, things. To where? A glass of water, a quench to a runny nose, red in the face, in the glass. Liquid seeks the lowest point. Bed time. the heart grows. It looks like this: red, crispy, when you put it in water it becomes larger and squishy: Heavy demands are met as this grows: this is the paradigm of the incongruous anti-nature toy. It came in a plastic cup. Demands of nature are the nasal passages, liquids return from whence liquids walk, compose, lay in bed, etc. Don’t move, I warned Becky! Every step is a new germ folding inward into other germs, outward like diamonds sparkling into the system, sugars into tea. The only thing for sickness is liquid, the original-style poetic return to form is liquid, the liquefied sack of poetry is infected right now. The heart in the glass: an invention of fun. The telephone: the popular model powered with liquid currents, is unclean on the receiver. The diamonds spread! The hot tea! With liquid, electricity, nouns are: Red in the faced, cups upon cups grow smaller.
Liquid, expected. What else is there? The glass is the surprise.
Easter, Hillside Prison is terribly contraining. Christ, Your love of history. Your love is understandable. You should be the one to remove the crown of understatement. Blood is less than flowing during ceremonies, during observance. You are lofty with me, above the poem, at the top of the hill at last. Downhill is just a soft kind of run. Christ, in the interim, unavoidable translation:
The kind of games we love are games of constraint.
Pigeon Bathtime This was the family dog who I called a pigeon because he jaunted and scoured; the direction of movement from one paw to the bowl of food to the flapping wings to a curblike smell from where we wash the filth in it being a muddy creation like a factory puddle. I have no disagreements with runoff. That is something I can agree on. .“something” hides, steals, splashes, makes a mess. Looks out the window of the sink for somethingspheres are spheres that deserve protection. Eats its food off the ground, whether it’s a floor or the ground downtown. A beak messes, measures a snout. A beak pounds the pavement. Pave over this sleek sensibility with water: I recommend not letting it jump out of the sink to the kitchen floor, like a darkly sopping rainbow sloping and shaking water from fur wherein we realized then it was like it was about to take flight.
Russell Jaffe is a recent graduate of the MFA in Poetry program at Columbia College, where he also taught Writing and Rhetoric and Enhanced Composition. He is also a recently displaced Chicagoan in New York. He is the founder and editor of the poetics blog O Sweet Flowery Roses, and is also a professional wrestling journalist. His poems have appeared in Ariel, Word Curves, The Archive, and Columbia Poetry Review.