Lowell Jaeger

March 14, 2024

“Trash” by Lowell JaegerPosted by

Lowell Jaeger

TRASH

This year’s leaves are last year’s leaves
again. Even the loam breathes.
I believe this and Leonard YoungBear says
in the old days there was no such thing as trash:

Indians camped and left ashes only, or bones,
bits of hide, feathers, mounds of buffalo dung.
What the dogs didn’t eat, coyotes did.
Or wind, snow. Beneath trees and prairie grass

everything from the earth returned. Human life
too, Leonard says, should be like that.
I know, I say, I’m not afraid anymore
of dying. It’s trash

that worries me. Caskets. I keep thinking
of tin cans, foil, yellow rubber raincoats don’t
rot very quick, don’t burn either; bury them
and something spits them back. I’d sooner fall

in the woods, feed the sharp teeth of many hungers
beyond my own. And part of me will swim downstream
in the cold eyeball of a fish next time, my soul
under the wings of a young bird learning to fly.

—from Rattle #37, Summer 2012

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Lowell Jaeger: “As a teen in the great north woods, I spent long quiet hours in my hometown library, where I found solace from troubles at home, troubles in school, and troubles in the world. I sat in the big leather chairs and read T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland. I had no clear understanding of the book, such a foreign, worldly voice, so unlike the talk of local lumberjacks and factory workers. Yet that poem and I sat and conversed mysteriously beyond the words on the page. For a while, that poem was my best friend. I’d be honored if any poem of mine were ever so esteemed.” (web)

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May 8, 2021

“His Song” by Lowell JaegerPosted by

Lowell Jaeger

HIS SONG

The grown child rides in the backseat, only half-listens
as Mom and Pop bicker. Lapses into sizzle
of splash beneath them. His hometown lit for Christmas
blurs at the car window; he’s back
in that landscape he’d ached in more than half a life ago
where he wanted absolutely nothing
more than guts enough to run away.

And what was so terrible? They neither
beat him nor mistreated him more than most
kids are forbidden in front of their parents to be who they really are.
Funny how willful seldom get what they ask for. He’d asked
his parents (hadn’t he?) over and over in the absence
of his emotions, the ghost of good behavior—gulping his liver
and onions with tall glasses of whole milk—
swallowing the unspoken prayer at the table

that Mom and Dad quit the squabble, stuff it
like he’d learned he had to. A solid couple
dozen years later nothing’s changed
and everything’s different: same old man at the wheel
and old lady crabbing beside him. They’ve shrunk
to rodent-size, wrinkled and gray, eyes wide
with magnified terror of the nearsighted. Hardly
worth whatever anger he’d ever held for them.
And somehow closer now, everyone.

Mom and Pop squall in a dialect needing both mouths
to mix the words right, while the son sits like a stone at his post,
listening, but not. Mumbling lines they expect
of his visits year by year. And smiling to recall
the song he invented that night, hidden
in the closet of the practice room, a brick wall
between himself and the high school band’s Yuletide concert;
his parents sleepy in the blindness beyond stage lights,
applauding what they assumed they could hear.

—from Rattle #26, Winter 2006

__________

Lowell Jaeger: “Before I learned to read, I’d hide in the closet with a flashlight and my older brother’s school books. I’d copy the books, word for word, into a wide-ruled tablet. I knew the syllables were saying things I hadn’t discovered yet. To this day, I feel the same about language. I hand-write drafts of my poems painstakingly, to puzzle out what’s still unknown.” (web)

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June 27, 2018

“Fish-Burger and Fries” by Lowell JaegerPosted by

Lowell Jaeger

FISH-BURGER AND FRIES

I’m writing to you, reader, from a McDonald’s Playland,
while my grandkids frolic like hamsters
inside a maze of plastic tubes.

They begged me to bring them here, jumped
up and down, tugged at my sleeves,
said, please, please.
Poems like this are everywhere.

A portly, bearded man in red suspenders
seats himself nearby. A woman enters,
squinting, scanning faces at the tables.
The man waves and wears a worried smile.
The woman waves like she’s fanning back
a cloud of gnats.

I’m dreaming she’s his estranged daughter.
That’s me, chomping fries and a fish-burger,
jotting notes because it’s a poet’s job
to go where people go and do what people do.

Do you ever like to go bowling? the man says.
He’s unwrapped a burger for her, stands
to fetch a straw for her milkshake.
She’s angled sidewise in her chair, not
facing him. Stop stroking your beard like that, she says,
a bit taken aback to hear the words, the harsh tone.

Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth,
said Picasso. Poems like this are everywhere.
Watch me! Watch me! my grandkids scream sweetly.
The man and the woman wobble between
awkwardness and solemnity. I’m swallowing it all,
pausing between bites and scribbles
to mop from this page of my opened notebook
a dollop of tartar sauce.

—from Rattle #59, Spring 2018

__________

Lowell Jaeger: “Poems are happening in plain view every day. It’s a poet’s job, I say in ‘Fish-Burger and Fries,’ to go where people go and do what people do. The older I get, I write from the imagination less and less. The world around us is rich and fabulous. I want to capture the world’s richness on the page, and let the world speak for itself.” (web)

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