Image: Barbara Jackson
(Editor’s note: My dear friend Barbara and I have known each other close to fifty years. We both come from that part of the Washington desert where nuclear waste lies in toxic holes in the ground, one of the nastiest places on earth. Barbara lost her mother in late 2016 and the synchronicity of adjacent events put a poetic point on her life. Barbara is one of my favorite poets. She gives voice to time and place and spirit, out past the realm of right angles.)
9/21/16 – 12/21/16
Baton Rouge
-Barbara Jackson
We’re walking in a place where the
Trees look like lightning
So dry the dirt burns
And the evening sky appears as a fresh bruise
The earth’s skin moves
Ever so slowly
The animal body senses
What the brain
Refuses to see
Here on the banks of the
Largest river draining
The west of North America
Here LIGO and Banda Aceh tell us what the animals already know
Across the basalt
That has begun to drink in and crystalize carbon
Deepest time to the edge of the universe
Slow gyre dancing
The hope
That this is a temporary madness
It has happened then and will again
An embedded story of immense floods of lava and ice
Steeply carved stone canyons, scattered erratics and rippled crumbling hillsides
Barren beauty and limitless sky
Quickly blooming wild onions and lilies on the cooler north slopes
This is the story we told as my mother began to slip farther away
Deep time along the western rim
Exposes the sweetness where I can report the doctor just came through to say he loved her… she said the same thing to him…
In the midst of her gentle leaving we went to the B Reactor
Drawn to witness the first songs in a decommissioned nuclear power plant
Singers and musicians began with poems and ended with Agnus Dei
In the desert rain is scarce and tentative
Yet for her passing the local headline read
Overnight Downpour Smashes Tri-City Area Rainfall Record
- inches of rain in 9 hours
The most recorded since 1947
Then The Election happened
And that day Leonard Cohen left us
Left us with his cryptic words set to music guaranteed to echo where we rarely go
Reminding us
“Ring the bells that still can ring.
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything.
That’s how the light gets in.”
Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah
The world has ended
Go in peace
But stop for a moment, before you go, and listen to Patty Smith sing
Dylan’s A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall for the Nobel People
He sends his regrets
© 2016 Barbara Jackson
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