November 12, 2020

David Jordan

LET’S MEET YESTERDAY

Puzzling over his date book,
our chairman says: The next meeting
will be—hmmmm. Yesterday.
That must be wrong, don’t you think?

Not at all. I’d love to meet yesterday.
I’d ride in on my red Schwinn,
the one with white rubber mud flaps,
battery-powered horn hidden
in the crossbar, dented fender
where I clobbered the neighbor lady’s
parked car. I’d bring Midnight, my dog
Pop shot after he caught distemper,
and Calico, my cat who died
after Walter Bongi kicked her. I’d sit
on that yellow plastic kitchen chair
I chewed a hole in during a tense
moment listening to “Bobby Benson
and the B-Bar-B Riders.” We’d drink
Bosco, eat Moon Pies. During the break,
we’d argue whether Duke Snider
and the Brooklyn Dodgers are better
than Willie Mays and the New York
Giants. I’d jot notes on a lined sheet
of paper made with wood chips
big as my fingernail, then wad
it into the back pocket of my jeans
with the iron-on patches at the knees
and go home to Mom Quigley,
who would feed me cinnamon rolls
and sing “The Old Rugged Cross”
while she sweeps the floor, never once
mentioning the stroke that put her
in a coma for five years before she died.

from Rattle #26, Winter 2006

__________

David Jordan: “When asked why I write poetry, I like to quote composer-writer-performance artist John Cage: ‘I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry.'”

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July 4, 2017

David Jordan

QUESTIONS OF THE HEART

Love slips away
like starshine, like the sea,
like summer. It’s here,
it’s gone,
you didn’t see
it go. Somehow,
though, love turned
to expectation, to demand,
to negotiation, to eyes
turned aside
from questions of the heart.

I equated love
with fate, believed
a specific someone waited
out there
for each of us,
the task was to stay loose,
stay alert, grab love’s main chance
when it came. Now I realize
people connect
for a million wrong reasons,
collide and entwine
and slide away and sometimes
split but often stay
together yet apart, year
after year, and then one day
a man is fifty years old
and wishing
someone loved him.

from Rattle #17, Summer 2002

__________

David Jordan: “I write poetry to explain life to myself. If I continue to write, perhaps someday I will understand. That will be nice.”

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