Photo by Dana Spiardi
Jane McCreery has been publishing poetry for more than twenty years and is best known for her collaborations with artists from other genres. Among her projects have been exhibitions with photographer Michael Graybrook and sculptor James Shipman. The Mary Miller Dance Company choreographed its modern dance performance, "Cabfare Downtown," to Jane’s narrative poem on the life of Andy Warhol. A painting and poetry cycle she created with artist Robert Qualters, "A Book of Hours," was named one of the ten best art events of 1986 by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.From 1997 to 1999 Jane was co-host and co-producer, along with poet Jan Beatty, of Prosody on WYEP (91.3 FM), Western Pennsylvania's only weekly radio program devoted to contemporary literature. Her work on that program included interviews with Eavan Boland, Yusef Komunyakaa, and U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky.
Jane attended the Graduate Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh where she studied poetry with Gerald Stern, Ed Ochester, Paul Zimmer, and Maggie Anderson. Her manuscript Me, Jane, now circulating among publishers, has been a finalist for the Nicholas Roerich Prize and the Agnes Lynch Sterrett Award. She has also received an International Award of Merit from Atlanta Review and a Poetry Award from the Three Rivers Arts Festival.
A chapbook, Before the Fever, was published this month by Lepus Press (lepuspress@bigfoot.com). Her work can also be found in the anthology Doors of the Morning (Toronto: Unfinished Monument Press, 1997).
Jane McCreery lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she makes a living as a freelance writer specializing in marketing communications.
CANTICLE
Leaving Pittsburgh through the Fort Pitt Tunnel I suffer a moment of blindness. A dream of morals and charms. The shock of sudden night astounds though I've been making this trip over thirty years. You would think I'd learn something from these little deaths, but I bump along the bricks, both hands on the steering wheel, wearing my cockeyed hat, unable to remember the first time. Like so many other journeys this one begins and ends in darkness.
"Canticle" originally appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
FOR AN ARTIST DRAWING ROCKS
Nothing could seem simpler than this: water and rocks, a place you have drawn before. Elementary.
As are all of the difficult things in life. I imagine you crouched over your work, attending to the details —
light and shadow. The presence and absence of objects in the natural world, their relationship
to each other, create the tension. What is passing through your mind as you record this ancient history?
That's what people never know about each other. Master Kung believed enlightenment was found in learning
to call things by their right names. I think this is how we practice: you draw the ocean inlet
over and over; I write these lines translating the work into yet another language. And while we distract each other,
water washes over the rocks again and again, changing everything.
"For An Artist Drawing Rocks" originally appeared in Atlanta Review
JUST A LITTLE BIT HARDER In memory of Albert Alessi
You were banished to the hallway and I was keeping you company. The guy you were in love with was in love with a girl who didn't love him. I was too young to love anybody. OK, so that's a lie. I loved you. But I accepted the fact you would never have me. Like you accepted that cute Bruce was using your room to seduce the ballerina. So pretty and perfect, I thought. "Not even fully grown," you groused, surmising that if breasts meant so little to Bruce he really, deep down inside, wanted a man. You, of course.
So we sat on the floor, side by side, backs against the wall. You analyzed everyone in the rooming house, door by door -- one phobic, the next manic-depressive, next door to that a certifiable nut, no doubt about it. Who could live in a disintegrating dive like this except the rejects of society?
That was the night you quoted Freud, a theory I struggled with, years into the future: "When you believe everyone around you is crazy, that's when you are." But I was so sure about all those people, and I dreaded we were hopelessly sane.
Bruce cranked up the music, blasting it through the cheap drywall. Janis. I don't have to remind you how we played her over and over. She fit the mood. Fat thighs, pocked face, skaggy hair, everything that would keep most women quarantined, Janis Joplin wore like a badge. We adored her bellow, her bathos, her blues.
You were the one who made me believe Janis was saving the world so it could appreciate the likes of me. You were the one I first heard say the word "transcendence." Maybe Bruce was trying to shut us up, or cover his own mews of love. That poor little ballerina, she thought a roach was an insect.
A few months later, Janis was dead. You stopped playing her music for two years. You flat out disinherited the person you called "the embodiment of truth." Not until your 30th birthday, you were so wasted, you let us play "Try" and I expected you to toast her, or cry, or reiterate your thesis: "Joplin's Contribution to Gender Role Confusion in Society," but you just kept sucking on the hash pipe.
I didn't understand that kind of grief, until I watched you follow Janis through the worlds of desire, affliction, and death. Albert, I wouldn't say your name, I confess I made myself stop thinking of you for years. Then one day on the radio I heard Janis singing, "Try . . . just a little bit harder," and her voice dragged me back into that hallway. "Just a Little Bit Harder" originally appeared in The Ledge
MADONNA AND CHILD
I wanted to strike the woman reading a Bible storybook to her daughter in the doctor's waiting room.
She told the girl dreamily, "Sometimes God has to punish people by sending them away, or taking the things they love."
I wanted to reproach her — every child will learn this soon enough and not from books.
There is loss. And more loss. And even now, after all our trials, nobody can prove for sure God has anything to do with it.
But I didn't move or speak while she chattered on explaining the simple pictures.
STILL MILES FROM HOME
That long stretch of bad road seems worse in ambiguous twilight. The sky has broken out a few guiding stars but to feel really secure requires memory.
On the radio Dylan sings, "What seems huge in the distance close up ain't never that big." Then the great train overpass I'm moving toward makes him a liar. I hold my breath as the earth drops away and the car crosses a rickety bridge. The river down there a pencil line in the black cleft and it's forever before the road feels solid again. I'm relieved to hug the curve of a hillside blasted away to sandstone. Feeling small.
Unable to see the crest of the mountain. Wondering what could be up there. Dark pines stirring, the ghost of a moon? A boulder loosening?
LATE IN SEPTEMBER
After a day of rain, the sun comes out just in time
for it to get dark. As light fails I prop the basil up, shaking off its water burden.
Sedum blushing under huge crowns, petunias spilling out of mossy pots — a little leggy, but expressive —
this is the time I love the garden best.
In the kitchen, Johnny saves the last note of that old Aretha song. His ripe voice just short of breaking
he wails, A rich man might be poor if money is all that he has. He believes himself and I believe
the last defiant roses, ready to burst open as if it were June.
EVERYTHING ABOUT YOU
The computer operator knows your debts to the penny but doesn't have a clue what people owe you. Your hairdresser knows how hard it is for you to look like yourself. Your physician knows your weaknesses but your body will surprise him eventually. Your boss knows what you want her to know.
The man in the ski-mask knows your fear as well as your bravery. Your therapist knows about the darkness, but not the same darkness as your lawyer. The maid knows less than you suspect.
Your parents have amassed information but often confuse you with their other children and give themselves too much credit. Ditto your brother and sister, who also know less and less as time passes. Your grandparents know the family history, but only your childish ways.
Your best friend knows the most and still manages to be indulgent. Your spouse knows the second most and that bad and good even out after all these years.
Your children know which of them you love best and how to get over on you. Your lover knows the wildest secrets of your heart.
You think you know every part of the story but even you'll never know what you really look like and who will miss you most when you're gone.
Night and Day in Venice
In the middle of the night I woke. Pushed open the enormous wood shutters to breath the cool, musky air and saw little fires burning, not along the canal, but in it.
Fires floating in ink-black water. Reminders? Signals set by lovers, explorers, secret agents? No sounds except water lapping and the tap of heels on distant cobblestones.
A flag with a palacio's crest stirred across the canal. Amazed by the stillness of a city without a single car I lingered at the window wondering about the fires, waited for a meaning to come,
puzzled by this country of people who sing in the streets, and exchange money in huge denominations. I thought about the smells of basil and gorgonzola in the trattoria where we ate surrounded by Germans,
anticipated cappuccino I would drink in the morning. Too few hours of sleep and I awoke again this time to the sound of delivery boats motoring through the canals. The light was steely
and austere, not gold as it seemed in Rome. In this light I realized my little canal fires were only reflections cast by wrought iron streetlights bending over the rippling water.