Poetry Offering from Rebecca Jackson | Poem

 
 

 
 

Potential

Memory of the Fall

Growing Understanding

bio
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 

Potential

She wanders a vague triangle--
kitchen, hallway, window--the sharpening angle
of afternoon fretted with the gulls'
hysterical laughter, lonely and dry.
There is a  tang in the air, a wry
thunder-promise tangled with waiting, the eye
of the storm suffusing the rooms, listening to her bones creak
and laughing softly with the gulls. Her mobility reeks
of stillness, she smells like seeds in spring, like old grass that ekes
a life from salt and sand.  This is the moment before release,
the tide-turn, the pearl-grain, an ease
that is distant and immanent, like the sea.

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Memory of the Fall

Do you remember the night
we spoke in tongues
and everything was free,
free

You built a fire
from crumbling branches and sterno--
it licked your fingers
like a dog, and smoked
grey-green into the cold humidity
of 7 o'clock

We dismembered the afternoon
and cast her,
piece by piece,
into the fire,
deciphering the long
shadows of the grass
as the blade of the moon
sliced the sky,
a bowl replete
with restless iron stars
 

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Growing Understanding

You are a creation of words
choked with verdant syllables,
ideas made flower-flesh,
the whorl of an orchid's throat
gasping beneath the onslaught
of delineation

You plumb the ophidian depth--
the wary and unwary charm
of vegetation and deep thready roots;
a habit of translation

You are a veritable jungle
of language--
a profusion of insistent vines and color,
you exhaust the sun--
a transcendence of photosynthesis

Your speech breathes,
a vegetable frenzy
a living flow,
slipping towards pools of water and rivers and rain,
there is a frightening lucidity
locked green beneath your skin.

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bio:

Rebecca has difficulty pinpointing when she took a turn for the literary, although she thinks it could be traced back to 3rd grade, with her "masterpiece that began "Red is the color of the evening sky / red is the color of a bike you buy." Rebecca has spent considerable time in the field of creative writing, editing various literary magazines, and running workshops and critiquing seminars. After earning her undergraduate degree in English with a specialization in creative writing, she moved to the Midwest, and completed her M.A. in English at the University of Illinois.

Rebecca currently lives in Illinois, and works as an Organizational Development Specialist for Technisource Inc. In addition to writing, she divides what little spare time she has among the Society for Creative Anachronism (a medieval and renaissance re-creation society), costuming, photography, and Malachite (a somewhat demanding iguana).

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