In the unrealistic days of their marriage there was a question whether she would read what he wrote. He was a beginner and she is a tougher critic than she meant to be. It was touchy, her embarrassment, his resentment. Now in his letter he said, damn! but this book is good. How much he had learned about life and craft. He wanted to show her, let her read and see, judge for herself. She was the best critic he ever had, he said. She could help him too, for in spite of its merits he was afraid the novel lacked something. She would know, she could tell him. Take your time, he said, scribble a few words, whatever pops into your head. Signed, “Your old Edward still remembering.”

She remembers giving him advice on how to write. How audacious that now seems. She said, you need to stop writing about yourself, nobody cares how fine your feelings are. He replied, Nobody ever writes about anything but himself. She said, You need to know literature, you need to write with literature and the world in mind. For years she was afraid she had killed something in him, and she hoped his turning to insurance meant he didn’t mind. But this book looks like a different kind of answer. She wonders how much contempt or irony lies behind his choice of subject, and she hopes he is sincere.

Despite his fine outer manner, she soon discovered he had suffered a crippling injury: his heart was broken. He had been engaged to a girl named Maria, who had jilted him and married somebody else. Jilted: a good old-fashioned word. He did not seem heartbroken. He seemed vigorous and enthusiastic about the future. But heartbroken was a secret state, which she could share. It occurred to her she was heartbroken too, on account of Jake, who was retaliating for her career choice by a program of worldwide travel and picking up girls. She and Edward could be heartbroken together. It gave them something to talk about, and it protected them from each other, like brother and sister: no need to worry about hearts since their hearts were broken.

I don’t know why or how

Sometimes in August a maple

Will drop through a leaf burned through

Its tender parts with coral

While the veins keep green –

A rare device of color.

When I found such a one

I acted the despoiler,

Taking it from the woods

To give a friend for a trifle,

But her mind was on good deeds

And I turned shy and fearful.

The boobyhatch’s bars, the guards, the nurses,

The illimitable locks and keys are all arranged

To thwart the hand that continually rehearses

Its ending stroke and raise a barricade

Against destruction-seeking resolution.

Many of us in there would have given all

(But we had nothing) for one small razor blade

Or seventy grains of the comforting amytal.

So I went down in the attitude or prayer,

Yes, to my knees on the cold floor of my cell,

Humped in a corner, a bird with a broken wing,

An asked and asked as fervently and well

As I could guess to do for light in the mists

Of death, until I learned God doesn’t care.

Not only that, he doesn’t care at all,

One way or the other. That is why he exists.

   Yet had I not much

who went out – out! – among those

heartless all around, to look

   and talk sometimes and touch?

   In the big lunatic house

I did not fly apart nor spatter

the walls with myself, not quite.

   I sat with madness in my mouth.

   But never, it was never enough.

Else how could all these books

I did not write bend down my back

   grown now so old and rough?

Leaning over me, she took my head into her hands,

the short hair thick still, full beneath her fingers.

She told me she had read that pressure (from

a rubber band about the head) combined with

lowered temperatures (from ice) would sometimes

keep the drugs from killing hair roots in the scalp.

I suffered numbness, ache from cold, for her,

for hope. She only had to try it once.

So what is it, then, this being human,

except just being, here on the porch,

in the last square of sunlight,

dulled from some—

as it will seem much sooner than you think—

bearable blow.

You still can feel this last heat.

the softened and flowery breeze.

You can still hear the bird’s static:

lovers pairing up all over town.

Could it have been the body’s fault?

--its need to grow betraying me

as when my uterus contracted

faster and with increasing force

at what could not be driven out?

--or when the allergy to Compazine

that made my jaw go sideways hard

until it almost broke?—when the doctor

(on-call, coming just in time)

shot Valium in my open vein?

Sixty miles per hour, blood.

Where might that river take mw now, that flood?

In the shed the cow lies upside down mooing weakly. The men hang droplights from the ridgepole, and keeping her on her back, they spread her front and hind legs in opposite directions, tying them to opposite walls so she can’t kick. Kneeling over her swollen belly holding something that looks like a miniature fire extinguisher, the vet sprays her with antiseptic. The cow’s eyes roll, the whites showing, and she lets out faint moans, ever dwindling protests of pain and fear.

Used courtesy of the University of Iowa Press

I found the deer not long before I got his first call, the first Sunday in October. Before that it had been just letters, since I’d met him back in June. It was mid-week preceding his call, Wednesday or Thursday. I’d been hiking back along the Wildcat Creek, and just as it was coming on twilight I found the body, cached. It was all but covered with a heap of spruce cone scales, but I saw a tawny bit of it, and I bent down and touched it and it was a fresh-cached deer.

Used courtesy of the University of Iowa Press

The porcupine lay there on her back, as if looking up at us. One foreleg lay across her breast and the other was curled by the side of her face. It did seem, in fact, that she wore a parka of guard hairs, yellow around her body. A shining hood of them circling her face. Her hind feet curled toward the earth, the golden hairs curving over them like little fur boots.

Used courtesy of the University of Iowa Press

Dear Yu Honor

Yu may rmember me when yu visits prison

here I am Walter Boyd Leadbelly #42738

yo best big niger from Sugarland Farm

wit my stella guitar and songs yu like

I play it all like a black machine for yu loud an slow

Down in the valley    What a frend we have in

Jesus an I Sugarland shuffle like pickin cotton far as

eye cn see I need my freedom like yu said yu was gone give me

yur honor all I need a second chance rmembr me

yu sed I was som niger   som niger need they pardon

GOVERNOR

thank yu for yo kind kind hand yo wisdum.

Copyright 2004 by Tyehimba Jess. Published by Verse Press. Reprinted with permission of the author and Wave Books. 

This country needs a Columbus like me.

I have sighted a dark territory

to map, mount, and measure: its fat, prickly

fruit weighed for value and veracity.

I stake my claim on the breath of each Black

willing to open his mouth and spit out

southern legend’s soiled roots. I will blue

the pale ears of Ivy League lecture halls

with secrets snatched from between Negro jaws.

They seek primitive man’s oracle,

covet my careful codification

of these ethereal chants born from strife,

the way I pen it down in black on white

page and bid it dance; the feral language

of a folk bent and broken as the notes

grinding up through marrow and memory.

Copyright 2004 by Tyehimba Jess. Published by Verse Press. Reprinted with permission of the author and Wave Books. 

   i am disturbed and distressed at   this man messin’ with my music,

            his beginning to show off    preachin’ how a songster gotta be pure

                    in his songs and talk   —like he got a deed to folkways,

              when his money value is    the way blues sweats out a man

                                           to be     like prayer

                       natural and sincere   set free from smotherin’

            as he was while in prison:    in a solitary cell.

                                      of course,  fact is,

                 as this tendency grows,  this two time jailbird loser –

                   he will lose his charm   he ain’t ‘bout to lose nerve, too,

                                         and become only an

                                       ordinary,   old timey,

                                 low ordinary    busted out,

                                         harlem    countrified

                                                  nigger.

Copyright 2004 by Tyehimba Jess. Published by Verse Press. Reprinted with permission of the author and Wave Books.