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jmharper
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Name: Jason
Country: United States
State: New Jersey
Metro: Princeton
Gender: Male
Interests: music, writing...writing music, love, books, travelling the world, people, vanilla lattes, charming dialogues, supper, shakespeare, large bodies of water.
Occupation: Student
Message: message meEmail: email me
Website: visit my website
AIM:  augustine87
Member Since:
9/17/2005
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| my mother shrieked
and i answered
instinctively
with a "what's wrong?"
a dead bird.
flown into the downstairs
window with a
smack.
i pondered the situation philosophically:
"flying desperately towards what he sees
as clarity, he suddenly finds himself dea-"
"get rid of it, jason;
use the dustpan."
then she left for church.
i couldn't find the dustpan,
so i picked out a plastic bag from the
pantry. and took morgan, my dog
(who i tied up, though he kept on barking
as loud as he is now while i type).
immediately, my thoughts went to joanna newsom
I said a sort of prayer for some sort of rare grace
Then thought I ought to take her to a higher place
Said: "dog nor vulture nor cat shall toy with you
And though you die, bird, you will have a fine view"
Then in my hot hand
She slumped her sick weight
We tramped through the poison oak
Heartbroke and inchoate
The dogs were snapping
So you cuffed their collars
While I climbed the tree-house
Then how I hollered!
Cause she'd lain, as still as a stone,
in my palm, for a lifetime or two
i picked up the corpse,
unexpectedly warm,
(it must have just happened)
and buried it with a toss
into the woods.
that was that.
steven says two of my best friends
are having a tiff.
i hope it works out for the better
(though i love that he used the word tiff);
birthed in the 18th century,
it deserves a resurrection.
j.m. harper | | |
| the cleveland wrecking company,
or perhaps,
a worker sitting at his desk,
ankles crossed, brow bent -
clawing his mind for ideas
invented a simple, monstrous machine
built to convert urban erections
(humiliations) in cutting-edge metropolises
into bits of click-brick and crumble.
and now
a loneliness looms above me
like some giant steel bulb; the cranesman
wringing his hands;
swinging, without the slightest care,
his cleveland wrecking ball.
i suppose, though, it is not loneliness,
no; not when i am surrounded
by schoolmates and such.
it is something else:
a look i gave myself in the mirror this morning,
a book i half-read over lunch,
the way i revel in the taste and smell of orange flesh -
a surgeon fingering the citrus meat for clues
to the large, hidden hole in my little boat
that i cannot, for the life of me, find;
let alone, plug,
though i finger it roughly; without the slightest care.
j.m. harper
| | |
| it started out on the dinky, a small,
clunker of a train that rolls back and
forth from the university to the junction
where i disembark and join my next train:
the train that will take me through elizabeth, metuchen
metropark, new brunswick, newark, and finally,
new york city.
i read kerouac's "on the road," the part where
sam and remy's friendship comes to a stop
(metuchen my engineer is saying, the hiss of steel brakes).
the part where sal finds terry on a bus
and falls in love with her almost sickeningly fast.
i snap of few pictures of the seats
and the window
adjusting the aperture, the speed, the focus
SNAP
of my camera. give the engineer my ticket stub
and slouch back, thinking.
when we reach new york, i've slept for about
fifteen minutes but not dreamed, or at least can't remember,
which has been happening lately.
i wander meaningfully into the bustle that is penn station,
finding a map and taking a wrong turn before i
end up on the subway to the american natural history museum.
i (naturally)
disembark a stop too early, take the wrong number back,
and finally decide just to hump it the ten blocks to the museum
through central park.
i walked along the lake, the baseball field, the trees, the
playgrounds, through the scattered trees, runners, walkers,
bikers, children, adults. people and plants. that's central park.
it's great. it seems like no one is alone there. like taking a stroll by
oneself is a strange thing.
i agree, and continue talking to myself.
arriving at the museum (and exceptionally proud of myself for having done so)
i pay a girl who smiles at me and head inside, past a security guard
three times my size, who looks at my ticket and waves me in
past a group of schoolchildren and camera-laden asians, like i
am something special.
i meander around the african jungle section,
falling in love with the group of elephants, frozen
in a large, dark hall, trumpets high, proud, muted,
their stomping parade filling the center of the room.
i think of africa. how close i am. three months. i sigh.
excuse me, i whisper
as a pass behind a mother who tells her girl and boy
to smile as the father snaps a picture.
he looks like he loves them. oh, she says
and steps aside, eyes still on the caged antelope behind the children.
i pass by the lions. leo leo the latin sign reads.
lions live a surprisingly short time. and have an incredible amount
of babies in one litter. i move on to the monkeys in the next room.
their names, i don't pay attention to. their faces, i do. why do monkeys
look so dejected? i don't see any with smiles. and don't remember having done so.
except for chimpanzees, which i get the feeling
are the "bad uncles"that other monkeys simply
put up with. you know, humor when the obligatory
relative visit comes around.
just give him the sofa, i see the baboons saying.
god forbid he stays for a week like he did last year, they say
behind closed doors. or buttress roots. or whatever they tell secrets behind.
waterholes.
i leave africa and travel back in time
to the dinosaurs. skeletons, twelve, twenty times bigger than you or i
loom above - massive creatures outlined by the silhouettes of
glazed brown skeletons.
i spend a long time there, trying to bring them to life in my mind.
i make my way upstairs to the astronomy exhibit
but am distracted by the large windows
by central park, which is calling me to a bench.
so out i head, realizing an hour has passed in the museum. i find a bench in the sun,
text daniel, who i'm meeting for coffee,
and begin thinking in earnest. people of all shapes,
sizes, and colors pass by. i watch them keenly.
i'm not falling in love anymore. just observing.
another hour passes as i watch the shadows creep closer
to me. i wonder what i'm supposed to be doing
as a human being. what and why and if i'm supposed to be giving
more of me. to people. to life. to whatever.
dan texts me where you at foo?
i laugh to myself and respond. i love it when we don't let
intelligence get in the way of laughter. we must always laugh
at ourselves, at life, at the utter irony of things.
how about columbus circle, he says,
go south to 59th and cen park west.
| | |
| i'm always sitting in cafes.
either working -
"i'll have a tea, candy bar, ginger ale." "sure." -
or working -
"what's that?" "it's kant, it's marx, it's seamus heaney."
yet, my mind is often run
to other places.
places that i love although
i've never been.
for example, today in irish poetry,
where students use words too big
about the books we study, but the books we study
taste good like black coffee,
seamus said
"As a child, they could not keep me from wells
And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.
I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells
Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss."
and i suddenly found myself
there
among the ferns and waterweed
and fought the deepest sense of
nostalgia, which must have lost its way
into my mind.
"Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,
To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing."
and why does it become such a crime
to finger slime and stare
like Narcissus into the water -
in love with simple nature?
when do we start loving fast cars
and magazines, and televisions
and other people's things
instead
of admiring our own small fortunes -
the land and the sea
with a bottomless wonder?
i, too, seamus, recourse to
earthy poetry. | | |
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