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02-02-2021

 

Judy Jordan​

​

Io Moves Into the Greenhouse

 

If you asked, Io would say that first winter, with its lumped

clouds, sifting snow, and finches frantic with hunger, seemed

never ending. In that far, far country, the jay screamed thief,

thief as the glazed saplings fell along the root buckled earth,

 

the sky stretched to the color of wet steel,

water pooled in cows’ tracks and footsteps

echoed across slick boards laid against mud.

But still she folded the soft-edged maps, packed away

 

the guides, the compass, the square, dismissed

proofs and theorems, the very idea of a pivot point

and drove from the city and its biting flies

which never slept. Closed doors of houses

 

with their many eyes of glass clasped shut

whizzed past as she clamored from packs

of dumped dogs howling sorrow into the night

and cats who leapt from the storm drains’ grates

 

and with one swift neck-breaking claw, snatched

the acorn-busy squirrels, those bundles of chittery fur

for whom living must seem like nothing

more than moments piled on moments of sheer

 

terrifying luck. Which is how she felt—except

for the luck—when she moved into the half-collapsed

greenhouse. Gravel slivered in ice, plant pallets

feathered with mold, bare-boned limbs of trees

 

leaning over fields strewn with stubble-this was her

world now. She settled in, solitude growing exact.

Peacocks cried, ever-watchful tails fanned,

as grasshoppers chewed their way up from their cold

 

graves and all the roots tunneled underground, iris anxious

to rise above the knives of themselves, hyacinths sloughing

off old skin, readying to burst forth, while Callisto,

that Great Bear, slogged on across heaven’s horizon.

 

​

Those First Mornings Living in the Greenhouse

      

     Waking with a fine snow of my own breath

laced across my face, I scratch a stranger’s name

on the ice-slaked plastic. Swinging above

my head, the wrist-thick rope with which I pull

myself from the army cot. Sun crawling over the pines

prisms through the interior frost and turns it to water

and fog so that the greenhouse becomes a phantom of itself.

Mist rises, ice melts, plants unfurl from their cold,

wet sleep to stretch and finger steam

as the sun staggers higher and shafts of light

swell and tumble and skirr

through the drizzle. Then the plants blink,

                                                                   fully awake,

their veined blood beating faster,

and the greenhouse opens like a bleached eye.

 

 

Into Light, Into Another Day

 

Even before half the greenhouse buckled

from the weight of back-to-back wet winter snows,

the design was nebulous: hollow steel curved

 

into arcs then screwed into four-by-fours

and pine studs. A high school gym’s surplus

shower curtain was strung aft to aft and rope-rigged

 

just where the steel had bent and broke

to salvage the half of the greenhouse still

curved like a translucent egg.

 

Floundering ship that never keeps out water or leaves its moorings.

 

But still it is a simple enough idea, the half

of the greenhouse with the huge gas heater crumpled,

steel snapped, plastic-ripped, peeled back, flapping in wind,

  

so where to go but to the other half: the cot

I sleep on, rising every two hours to chunk wood

into the brick-lined fifty-five gallon drum, the annuals

 

and perennials leaf-dark from cold, shifting a little

when the warm air sifts and fingers

through the tangle of bedding flats.

 

It is a job--of sorts. The pay what food I grow

and a place to sleep, safer than the streets.

                                    __________

 

Each gust of wind rips the greenhouse plastic

from the frame, then slams it back down

so that bedding shelves and hanging baskets shudder

 

and I grow to believe this tattered plastic

is the loose skin that separates the worlds and I feel

expectant, self-conscious, aware of an unknown gaze,

 

waiting for something, perhaps death, to reach through

the salt shore of my skin and jerk some unknown part

of me through my mouth’s roof to blasted air,

 

to a place I imagine smells scrubbed and like wild roses

and fog curling from a flooded field at two in the morning,

early May, cows restless in the distance, creek hurling past.

 

But now I know only the frog’s moans under

the bed, lightning-felled tree sending out fresh

stems all along its trunk, green furl of new plants,

 

tender and moist, and that smell, unnamable,

clean, reborn, stretched from somewhere,

a strange and waiting place, to here.

 

                              _______________

 

Plate, spoon, knife, cast-iron pan.

Rope I pull myself up with. Futon,

 

pillow, seams bleeding feathers,

desk lamp hanging by its cord

 

from the metal hoops beside the one

pair of dress pants, the sun-splotched coat,

 

water hose coiled on the ice-slivered gravel:

how I name myself now. And this:

 

            flats of plants, flats of bone-flecked wet, black loam,

            slim seeds slipped into soil so rich it breathes.

 

____________________

 

The winter sun looks like polished stone

and all of outside is washed in a strange yellow light,

roof of clouds unbroken and full of rain.

I work all morning, elbow deep in sphagnum and peat moss,

 

                        BigBeefPrimeroNapoletanoMarjoramSweet

                        ValenciaMortgageLifterRosaBiancaDiamond          

                        TennesseeCheeseBloodyButcherBoxcarWillie

 

If clouds are the clothes of gods hung out to air,

then today it’s the lesser gods whose rags bunch

and tangle along the lines of heaven’s alleys,

tied window to soot-grimed window.

 

                        SweetMillionCaroRichSiamQueen

                        BigBoyLemonBoyBetterBoy

                        JetsetterMuchoNachoFinoVerde

 

On days like this my body unhinges: this focus on particulars,

this disappearance into pain, teaching me what death is,

tumbling me out of myself as I lay another seed flat along

 

the wood shelves gray with age, then pull myself up, though sometimes

the baseball bat beating of the herniated disc is so great,

I think that surely something else tugs me into light, into another day.

 

                        BigBerthaEarlyGirlSweetBabyGirl

                        BrandywineCaspianPinkCelebrity

                        LavandulaAngustifoliaNepetaCataria

 

Stretched out now, seeds softening, transplants’

bruised roots tender and dependent incubating

under this artificial sky and as I chunk more wood

 

on the fire, raise and lower the pump’s handle,

turn the hose to the finest mist, rain begins,

earnest and steady, falling to the snow-

 

saturated earth, tunneling through mud and roots

and burrows of shivering mice and falling on raptors scouring

the fields for those mice, on worm and cardinal and starling,

 

on ratsbane and rats alike, rain to rise again, surely as the dead

on their last walk, their trek across the trail of stars

we call the milky way, soon to rise again, rise to air,

 

stumbling along as all things must, on this light-dazzled,

star-spangled bridge of terror we say yes to,

this thing we call life, lucky, lucky, labyrinth of life.

​

-from Hunger (Tinderbox Editions, 2018)

​

Judy Jordan’s first book of poetry, Carolina Ghost Woods, won the 1999 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, the 2000 National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as the Utah Book of the Year Award, the OAY Award from the Poetry Council of North Carolina, and the Thomas Wolfe Literary Award. Her second book of poetry, Sixty Cent Coffee and a Quarter to Dance, was published by LSU press. Jordan’s third book, Hunger, was published by Tinderbox Editions in 2018. Jordan just completed a fourth book of poetry, Children of Salt, which will be released in 2021 by Tinderbox Editions, and is currently working on a fifth and sixth manuscript. Jordan built her own environmentally friendly earthbag and cob house off-grid surrounded by the Shawnee National Forest and teaches creative writing at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale.

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