Poetry Magazine

Jacqueline Marcus

USA

JackieMarcus@ForPoetry.com

Editor of ForPoetry.com
Featuring new and established poets.
http://www.ForPoetry.com

Jacqueline Marcus's first book of poems, Close to the Shore, will be published by Michigan State University Press in the spring 2002. Her poems have appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Antioch Review, The Wallace Stevens Journal, The Journal, Poetry International, The Ohio Review, The Literary Review and elsewhere. New poems will appear in Poet Lore and at the e-journal, Exquisite Corpse this spring. Jacqueline Marcus is the editor of ForPoetry.com. She teaches philosophy at Cuesta College.

 

Being

Does the road wind uphill all the way?
Right to the very end.

—Emily Brontë

 

By winter, the deer vanished quietly with the grass,

like Rothko's White and Greens in Blue—

bare, empty, and somehow, vaguely familiar

with its sad pines following each other up the hill,

like a funeral, disappearing.

_____

Parmenides argued that nothing exists except Being,

that the leaves, spoiled and wasted, in the wet flames,

are unreal, as unreal as desire, sensing the loss

of your own brief flight,

                                    as you get into your car, and drive on

with anxious predictability.

_____

There is loss. And then there is loss.

There is the sweet scent of fresh bread baking on the rue du Cherche-Midi, Paris.

And you, waking to the rush,

and that the flute you hear from an open window

is constant and longing for nothing so absent as this wind,

invisible music.

_____

 

Being and the many words that follow.

The vowels and sultry paragraphs,

forming its story of a meaningless world—

as habitual as any good Sunday:

the cars, the buses, the same drunk, begging,

everyone begging to sustain their weight

in the traffic and noise.

_____

 

A man sits down in the company of his friends. Someone begins to talk,

mechanically. He glances over to the light,

(the laughter entering the room is not his imagination.)

Something is beginning to slip from his hands,

the way the leaves slip from the elms.

________

 

Blackbirds churn the sky. No wind. Grey mist and a few drops of rain.

You pull off the road and stare gravely at the seagulls.

It reminds you of a scene in Italy during your travels in college,

as if you'd been asleep for twelve blank years.

You get into your car, and drive on

with unsettled predictability, a customary habit of the mind.

A heron sways above the willows.

Now it is beating its bright wings across the pastures.

This is how the soul distinguishes itself

from the endless hunger.

_____

If only for a moment, the scent of bread, the moon and the leaves…

 

Publication Credit: Faultline

 

 

The Empty Window

 

A tea kettle whistles on somebody's stove.
Now it's stopped. Now there is only the solitary
jingle of silverware. Leaves,
burning out.

Little by little, the mallards return to the lake.
The Grandfather clock strikes six,
as if the table, last night's empty glass of childhood
stories, were an illusion of peace.

This is how it is —
since our faith in words has vanished.

Of course, there was the night
when the stars were like tiny bells,
and the tambourine boats clanged in the wind
with their handful of nets

and for a moment, I believed
in the music of the night, that we were not alone,
staring at one another —
through the kitchen window across the yard.

So the old man prepares himself for another November.
The days are too brief for words. I see
his cigarette burn down like the last glow of coal in the dark,
like blue smoke.

 

 

To Give

 

I was late for the funeral. The slow
cars drove by, one at a time, through the rain and puddles.
It was not my own,
                                 but someone I didn't know at all.

A total stranger.

The young woman, in an elegant sweater,
                                                               hugging a loaf of fresh bread,

watches the last car
climb the single knotted road of a ruined village,
past the grove of cypress,
                                        and down the hill on the other side of the isle,

to the graveyard.

For a moment, she was Athena, contemplating our loss.

***

A stone temple rises in the half-abandoned skies.
The Lighthouse
                         flashes its years across the night.

But no Sirens of warning.
                                       Perhaps a table in an empty house,

three carnations in bottled water.
An elder closes his eyes, peacefully.
The foghorn sounds like a distant ship.
Rain fills a tin can,
                            a brass cymbal,

and the basket of apples on the front step.
                                                             But the newspaper remains folded

on the straw chair, rain-drenched.

What ever made us think we are here for the taking?

A man laughs out loud with his friends,

                                                           pours them all another glass of wine —

it's just that simple.

 

 

Old Peasant, 1903
after Paula Modersohn-Becker

 

They are the silent occupants of a barely penetrable world.

Sometimes they sit with their eyes closed in the aura of birch,
Or else the geese will feed quietly behind them.
There are times when they resemble the disciplined posture of priests
In the wrong clothes,
But I paint them holding the stem of a poppy,
A red poppy—like the tiny glow
Of the soul, barely penetrable.
I am drawn to their sadness which binds them
To these fields, the purple summers.
What do they know that we don't know?
What feeling fails us?

You worked all the days of your life,
Breaking the soil like crusts of bread, tasting the seeds
That raised you.
You turned it up and packed it down like your fathers
Before you. What patience is this
That I am slowly learning?
Night after night, your mothers stared from the cottage windows,
The same endurance. Snow,
Spring and Autumn—the season of ritual and prayer—
This crumbling soil through your lined hands,
This daily pilgrimage

I keep seeking in my own face,
Though I am learning slowly that feeling is everything,
Feeling is the main thing,
And here near the poverty of sky, dark wheat,
I am alone
or the first time,
As though I were truly able to feel my way back—

To the impenetrable.

 

Publication Credit: Hayden's Ferry Review

 

 

Small Tree

after the photographer, Albert Renger-Patzsch

 

Perhaps it's the absence of color that draws him near to this tree.
It is small, thin, and like a stark crow —
it waits for no one.
There is a white field and a white sky
turns beneath the branches.

The first rains have not yet come. And yet
it is winter. There is no sound from the distant
shots, or the hospital filled
with the wounded...

Not a breath of wind, no birds or perpetual smoke
from the empty houses in the village.

Perhaps he imagines the sky as a frame of silence?
The tree, a sort of contrast, a line
drawn with chalk.
He has waited a long time to find this tree,
alone, in a somber moment.
Imagine the moon — as he adjusts the lens,
his subject focused into deeper light so that it's almost dark
a few yards back from the branches.

Is it not like a small boat,
drawing us close to the shore?

 

for Michael Kinsley

 

Publication Credit: Cider Press Review

 

© All Copyright, Jacqueline Marcus.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.