EXTRA CREDIT

Maddeningly Elusive,
Yet Endlessly Tempting

Like a far-off scream, like a mannequin leaning back-seat
into other mannequins careening, it could stand
for something. Just about. But gauzy and gray,
great slabs ease over, and root-like stems wither.
The radio plays, reducing us to a point; laugh and laugh,
even as a box of Kleenex scraps your hand.
The neighborhood sparks and becomes that blue haze,—
screams inside of screens, which will not stop the coming
of frost, only more frames. If I said, “All ants are fascist,”
would that be the comic turn? When the eyes fill up
(a kind of composting?), an occasion dresses for the mountainside:
Mardi Gras in the hills, downpour of skeins,
each brilliant, spiraling suicide a paper float like this one, here.
But then a father sets his pieces on a chessboard
the way a painter spreads out vials of colors
on a windowsill, and even this reminds me of emptying
brown bags of groceries: always first, cauliflower,
the little white trees felled in the bins, then miniature
vats of yogurt, then slender bodies of asparagus
dry-heaving beneath blankets of plastic. A woman sets
her keys on the counter through involuntary sniggers.
Something releases, like a red balloon one forgets
one never owned, and in her right eye she feels
emancipation, and in her left the swell of peppermint
pulls her towards the center of a far-off cry.
Then something else lets go, the ancient wetness
of clouds washing the sidewalks of memory.
Here and there, smoke rises from asphalt
like tranquil fires smouldering or fog lifting
like so many dead at once, that eternal chorus hurts.

Major Jackson

“Maddeningly Elusive, Yet Endlessly Tempting” is from Hoops (Norton, 2006), a new collection of poems by Major Jackson, UVM associate professor of English. Reprinted by permission of the author.

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