POEMS | Dale Jacobson

A BRIEF HISTORY

An empty room did not exist.

The plain was wide and far.

Its attic was filled with stars.

The forest was full of clothes.

We had to eat and so did they.

Teeth were cruel and so were we.

We made our own teeth that tore.

Sharpened stone flew like thought.

We ate until the bone was hollow.

Then we made a flute.

We called the wind and the dead.

The dead slept curled in the wind.

An empty room did not exist.

Then we built a box.

And caught the empty wind

and sailed to all the shores.

Some were slaves, hanged or whipped.

Some wore gold and owned the world.

Now an empty room is all around.

But the dead are nowhere found.

MORNING SONG

(the laws of morning)

The morning June sun builds threads of light

from sleep to street, and workers awaken the city

where night dreamed,

and the bustle of bus and business

awakens,

but in the museum of my skull, I see

gold leaves glide dim homesteads of dead summers,

this history–

I see

rain-worn buildings lean into

perpetual autumns–

I see

windows open to the weather, and wise flowers

spooked at morning into explosions of dust!

Surprises travel like hunted pigeons the bridges of rust,

and I remember those rivers when I first

felt the dead haunt the edge of twilight under

the white rock hung in the slant of the sky,

the moon that owns the old evening...

and the myths

that guided ancestors blazing in the stars...

Say...

where have they gone,

those parents of the dust

so infinitely quieted and hidden in the air,

their campfires the wind long ago erased?

They departed the party, walked into the river,

or place where

rain and river meet.

They sang themselves into the final legend,

ripples and rapids of our brief mortal waters...

(the romantic past)

Who owns the old plow

that tore open the earth,

planted the corn and fences

the Indians could not cross...

The wood handles are cracked

where hands once steered the blade,

its resins lost to night air...

Who owns the broken tools,

the decrepit cabin, its stove

now home to squirrels, the door

gone, a hole with useless hinges?

Who owns the farm now?

(an invention)

With heart and suffering

the workers built from the earth

the human voice that would sing

in the green wind of morning.

It was a machine like no other.

With heart and suffering,

while the stone would not move,

or the storm came with dark pronouncements,

or the thief with a knife came to steal a dream,

or the thief with soldiers came to steal a country,

yet the people, the workers worked and built

a voice, raised it up toward the gloaming,

and named the impermanence of the stars.

(the laws of dusk)

The high courts of noon

will whip the dead into the earth.

And yet, in a universe with

the heaviness of the heart

built into the heart, nevertheless

we drag our shadows, weightless

as we shall become, toward

the communal dusk where

our dream selves labor to construct

rooms from the lumber of the moon.

(a morning when dreams awaken, maybe)

That morning when lions of light

tear through the dark, then...

That morning when rivers purl rumors

of ancient dawns, then...

That morning when the first word

shed the husk of silence like a seed, then...

That morning when branches speak blossoms

from their roots of history, then...

That morning when red dawn bursts

with news of all other colors, then...

That morning when we understand at last

there is plenty of light...

That morning when we know

the face of the wind is everyone's face, then...

That morning when stones dream wings

and wings dream flight through stone, then...

That morning when workers come into the streets

and are called a city, then...

That morning when conscience is a sky

innocent as a child's leisure, then...

That morning when tomorrow is a door

"you shall not enter except in peace," then...

That morning when no one goes hungry

in a world become everyone's name...

That morning.