I’m sorry for still loving you this way. I’m sorry for letting these
words
lunge between us the way the wind does through a tiny knot of
flame.
I’m sorry for letting them ferment the way the sun does each
night.
There’s no excuse, and yet, maybe I am not so sorry for still loving
you
this way. I don’t pay any attention to the way the filament in the
bulb
glows for only a few seconds when the light goes out. It doesn’t
matter to me that the river stores the city’s lights only to sweep them
downstream.

Sorry or not, I don’t think there is anyone left in my soul.
Therefore,
I am not so sorry for still loving you this way, the way a sunken
boat
recalls its sail. Sometimes I think the heart is a beehive someone
has
turned over. Sometimes it is a silkworm building its obscure
cocoon.
There must be a few derelict constellations with no light to show
us yet.
I’m sorry, but sometimes I also think you have created the night.
Other times I think you must have inhaled the breath of stars.

I’m sorry for loving you this way, for loving you still. Each
memory
hollowed out the way water drips for centuries through a sandstone cave.

The ambulance siren slithering away through the streets but
lingering on.
The wood frogs freezing themselves dry all winter to revive in
spring.
I’m sorry, but maybe the truest love is the most desperate. I’m
sorry.
I’m not sorry. Sometimes I think these words rot like fallen fruit,
and
sometimes I think you are the smell of rain that inhabits the air
before a storm

Richard Jackson, Prairie Schooner (Volume 81, Number 2, Summer 2007)

The brightest stars are the first to explode. Also hearts. It is important to pay attention to love’s high voltage signs. The mockingbird is really ashamed of its own feeble song lost beneath all those he has to imitate. It’s true, the Carolina Wren caught in the bedroom yesterday died because he stepped on a glue trap and tore his wings off. Maybe we have both fallen through the soul’s thin ice already. Even Ethiopia is splitting off from Africa to become its own continent. Last year it moved 10 feet. This will take a million years. There’s always this nostalgia for the days when Time was so unreal it touched us only like the pale shadow of a hawk. Parmenedes transported himself above the beaten path of the stars to find the real that was beyond time. The words you left are still smoldering like the cigarette left in my ashtray as if it were a dying star. The thin thread of its smoke is caught on the ceiling. When love is threatened, the heart crackles with anger like kindling. It’s lucky we are not like hippos who fling dung at each other with their ridiculously tiny tails. Okay, that’s more than ten things I know. Let’s try twenty five, no, let’s not push it, twenty. How many times have we hurt each other not knowing? Destiny wears her clothes inside out. Each desire is a memory of the future. The past is a fake cloud we’ve pasted to a paper sky. That is why our dreams are the most real thing we possess. My logic here is made of your smells, your thighs, your kiss, your words. I collect stars but have no place to put them. You take my breath away only to give back a purer one. The way you dance creates a new constellation. Off the Thai coast they have discovered a new undersea world with sharks that walk on their fins. In Indonesia, a kangaroo that lives in a tree. Why is the shadow I cast always yours? Okay, let’s say I list 33 things, a solid symbolic number. It’s good to have a plan so we don’t lose ourselves, but then who has taken the ladder out of the hole I’ve dug for myself? How can I revive the things I’ve killed inside you? The real is a sunset over a shanty by the river. The keys that lock the door also open it. When we shut out each other, nothing seems real except the empty caves of our hearts, yet how arrogant to think our problems finally matter when thousands of children are bayoneted in the Congo this year. How incredible to think of those soldiers never having loved. Nothing ever ends. Will this? Byron never knew where his epic, Don Juan, would end and died in the middle of it. The good thing about being dead is that you don’t have to go through all that dying again. You just toast it. See, the real is what the imagination decants. You can be anywhere with the turn of a few words. Some say the feeling of out-of-the-body travel is due to certain short circuits in parts of the brain. That doesn’t matter because I’m still drifting towards you. Inside you are cumulous clouds I could float on all night. The difference is always between what we say we love and what we love. Tonight, for instance, I could drink from the bowl of your belly. It doesn’t matter if our feelings shift like sands beneath the river, there’s still the river. Maybe the real is the way your palms fit against my face, or the way you hold my life inside you until it is nothing at all, the way this plant droops, this flower called Heart’s Bursting Flower, with its beads of red hanging from their delicate threads any breeze might break, any word might shatter, any hurt might crush.

– Richard Jackson, via superstition [review]

There are times when they gather at the edge of your life,
Shadows slipping over the far hills, daffodils
blooming too early, the dark matter of the universe
that threads its way through the few thousand blackbirds
that have invaded the trees out back. Every ending

sloughs off our dreams like snakeskin. This is the kind of
black ice the mind skids across. The candlelight burning down
into the sand. The night leaving its ashes in our eyes.

There are times when your voice turns over in my sleep.
It is no longer blind. The sky is no longer deaf.

There are times when it seems the stars practice
all night just to become fireflies, when it seems there is
no end to what our hearts scribble on corridor walls.
Only when we look at each other do we cease to be ourselves.
Only at a certain height does the smoke blend into air.
There are times when your words seem welded to that sky.

There are times when love is so complicated it circles
like chimney swifts unable to decide where to land.
There are endings so sad their shadows scuff the dirt.
Their sky is as inconsolable as the two year old, Zahra,
torn from her mother and beaten to death in the Sudan.

There are endings so sad I want the morning light
to scourge the fields. Endings that are only what the river
dreams when it dries up. Endings that are constant echoes.

There are times when I think we are satellites collecting
dust from one of the earlier births of the universe Don’t give up.

Each ending is an hourglass filled with doors. There are times
when I feel you might be searching for me, when I can read
what is written on the far sides of stars. I’m nearly out of time.
My heart is a dragonfly. I’ll have to settle for this, standing under
a waterfall of words you never said. There are times like this
when no ending appears, times when I am so inconsolably happy.

Richard Jackson, “Alternate Endings” (via Superstition Review)

There’s a bit of leftover sun blowing around on the corner.
There’s the quivering branch the robin has just left.
Nothing is complete until we can see it. Even the trees
hold their breath. It may seem forever until you arrive.
There’s the prison of my shadow, these words which are
roadblocks, their elliptical emotions, the night’s refusals.

It may mean the dead need us, after all, to say the unsayable,
to hold in our hands a simple rose, to cup the wind, to feel
the endless longing the heart brings back from its inverted
world, that world whose destiny encases your every breath.

– Richard Jackson, closing lines to “My Many Disguises,” (full poem) from Out of Place: Poems (Ashland Poetry Press, 2014)