洞月亮 October 2016

FEATURED POET: Jacqueline Berger’s first book, The Mythologies of Danger, won the 1998 Bluestem Award and  Bay Area Book Reviewers Association Award. Her second book, Things That Burn, selected by Mark Strand, was the 2004 winner of the Agha Shahid Ali Prize and was published through the University of Utah Press. The Gift That Arrives Broken was the 2010 winner of the Autumn House Poetry Prize. Broadstone Press will publish her fourth book in 2018. Her poetry has been regularly featured on Garrison Keillor’s Writers Almanac.  She directs the graduate program in English at Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont, California, and lives in San Francisco with her husband.

You can contact her at jacquelineberger.com


REMAINS

Because the cassettes jostling in the wooden box

as I carry them to the dumpster

sound like horses returning to the stable—

what else can I do with them,

they can’t be recycled and who even

has anything to play them on,

each recorded by my father off an album

before those too were hauled to the garbage—

because replacement is the truest thing we know;

because I can’t bring myself to toss the tapes

so leave them beside the can, hoping someone

will want them; because the next day

they’re gone, and I wonder if right now

that person is listening to them on the last

remaining player in America,

or if, and just as likely, a neighbor

while dumping her own trash dumped the box of tapes,

tidying the alley, each freeing itself as it fell, Hebrew Melodies

banging against How to Belly Dance

before landing on the festering heap,

Noam Chomsky’s 1986 lecture languishing there.

Because the tapes are gone but not the carousels of slides—

how many pictures of flowers and mountains?

Because my father is still a mystery,

though what he left behind was briefly mine,

because I did not want to know my father

or my father did not want to be known,

because the clues solve nothing, so what

can I do but scatter the remains? 

―Jacqueline Berger 
WHAT ISN'T

Maybe it’s more a sense than a feeling,
or even a scent, unidentified 
weed that smells like curry 
and grew in the Hollywood Hills
where I went to camp and grows 
on San Bruno where we take the dog, 
the smell taking me back.
Nostalgia’s a bad shorthand but it’s something.
Or maybe it’s like lowering into a hot bath, 
the almost sorrow that rises with the steam,
though tenderness is even worse than nostalgia.
I’m off to a bad start, but let’s go with curry
in dry September, what I’m getting at
is how these days and for some time
I feel a pulling away even in the midst.
Driving to work, I’m already done 
with the calendar of busyness, 
people needing things from me, 
have already moved into the spacious years, 
the luxury and loneliness of Monday
and nowhere to be. Even as I’m pulling
into the parking lot, finding a spot,
hanging the employee placard from the rearview,
I’m long into the drifting of its after,
the wet sand of its soft mornings, my old
identity, ambition, unhooked.

And early evening on our walks up the mountain,
past the shell mound, past Owl Canyon,
on to Acres and through the top of town
before looping back to the car, 
the dog is gone and I miss him
who is, at this moment, burrowing in the brush 
or scratching his back against its rough.
I feel death’s empty room,
fluorescent hum in place of the low chant
all life if you listen carefully emits.
Will we get another dog, weighing
our modes of escape against the pinning down
of daily walks, burrs pulled from the tail.
And you too are gone, even in the middle 
of our lives, even as you drive us home,
the dog in the back seat sleeping like the child
we never had. Why do you die first?
How else to keep telling the story?
I’m alone and not young, then old,
the scent of burning leaves or rubbish,
acrid and sweet, spit thickening
in the corners of my mouth.
Is this a feeling that should be treated,
or is it a tapping into?
I won’t call it anxiety, depression,
will call it the open window,
the train’s thin whistle bending into the curve,
is it lament or the physics of sound?
Will call it here and also gone,
it will answer to both
like a dog with a previous owner
who learned himself by one name and then another.
Will call and call but there is no answer,
and that will be the answer, 
the doesn’t matter of its either way.

―Jacqueline Berger 

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WRITE YOUR POEM

Because the cassettes jostling in the wooden box

as I carry them to the dumpster

sound like horses returning to the stable—

because the clues solve nothing, so what

can I do but scatter the remains?

What is the scale of your simile?  At what point do you introduce another metaphor?

The beauty of what Jacqueline has given us is the quiet noise of cassette tapes rattling compared to a thundering herd of horses.  Just let the juxtaposition of those noises wash over you.  She then threads the thundering horses through the intimate and fragile questions.  

Then the final line puts us at a funeral.  No sound.   Simply ashes.   Look through your poem.  What is the scale of your word comparisons?  A music box against a calliope?  Look at your efforts.  Look at Jacqueline's.  Write your poem.  Cut apart a cereal box and write it on the inside in Sharpie marker and nail it to a telephone pole