☀ Today's Poem: "Now and Then" James Longenbach

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September 29, 2021

James Longenbach

1. The Borough
James is walking down Main Street, he's putting
One foot ahead of the other, one, two,
He's watching an egret
Stepping through the reeds,
Its body alert, then frozen, looking for fish.
Why can't he walk like that? Behind the broken-down wall
That's Lynn and Jeff's house.
There's the bench where somebody's sitting
Every day but not today. Today
The sun's too hot or else
Not hot enough, the water clear
Enough to see minnows quivering
In the grass. Because
I'm writing this,
Call me Jim.

2. Admonition
He acknowledges the sins of the people
In the wilderness, people like him,
But still he's troubled by one:
His pulse, his urine, his sweat—they all say nothing.
Neither does he find
Changes in his appetite,
His mind neither corrupted nor infatuated—
Yet his family, his closest friends,
They see something imperceptible,
Something always present
Which has established
An empire inside him: here
There are certain secrets d'etat never
To be said out loud
By which he has been bound.

3. The Egret
My mother looked for fish here, my father, too.
Probably you couldn't have told
Them apart, but mother fledged me,
Taught me to fly; then she was gone.
I heard she met a terrible end. Can I say that?
A terrible end. In the summer of '68
My father drove to Newark
For art supplies: crowds
Of people in the street, open hydrants, shattered plate-glass.
From then on the dent below the passenger-side
Window of the Chevy
Was from a thrown brick; there it stayed
Until the Chevy was replaced.
Of famine, love, difference
Of skin I knew nothing.

4. First Day
A boy folds his hands in his pockets, a teacher puts
Her arm around you: you compose yourself.
Compose, from the Old French composer,
To put together, to write. Inside
You're assigned a desk: even now
I'm sitting at a desk, I'm watching men
Fill a dumpster with furniture from an empty house.
Quarantine, from quaranta giorni, the practice of keeping
Ships out of Venice for forty days. You never speak
Of waiting outside the school,
You run home for lunch.
You like your egg-salad sandwich
On toast, you still do, but you know
About other languages: that morning
You learned a little song, Dites moi pourquoi.

5. Why
In the beginning, people were visible powers
Of nature, like the stars
And the moon. What about God?
Not that I'd had with him
A quarrel, only that his service,
As it was described to me, seemed disagreeable.
The consequence was not,
As anyone might expect,
That I grew selfish or disrespectful, but when affection
Came, it came with a passion
Uncontrollable, at least by me, who'd never
Had anything to control. When you
Visit here, as I hope you will,
Carry a sign—Attestation—
Certification of exceptional movement.

6. The Limousine
Immediately after closing my eyes forever
I'm rambling through the borough
In a big car: there's
The Holy Ghost Society,
And down by the water
Young people, most of them wearing
Wide-brimmed hats, little else!
We're gliding down the length of Main Street
At quarter to twelve in the morning,
The car stopping at a house where
Now, no older than four,
Maybe five, there's
Little James still running,
Glancing behind him, also
Looking around.

from the journal THE THREEPENNY REVIEW

READ ABOUT TODAY'S POEM

Forward

I found myself writing this sequence of poems near the beginning of the pandemic. Having recently finished a book, having thought about mortality more deeply than ever (so it felt), I never expected to write at all; and, though the sequence doesn’t openly mention living in close quarters during lock down, everyone zooming away, reading haphazardly books that happened to be lying around, thinking privately but publicly, the whole world increasingly in disarray, those realities now seem everywhere apparent to me, even the little predicaments bearing big questions.
James Longenbach on "Now and Then"

A Sense of Place in Silences
"Born in Pakistan and raised in Michigan, Hajjar Baban’s roots come through in her words—and the spaces between them....'A sense of place really informs the silence that occurs in my poems, and the questioning: Knowing that I am from this place or that place, but not being able to access it.'"
via ATLAS OBSCURA

READ ALL TODAY'S HEADLINES

What Sparks Poetry:
Martin Mitchell on Ellen Bryant Voigt's Messenger
"She is a poet of control and precision; across decades and amid differing poetical movements, Voigt is steadfast in her adherence to a clear-eyed iambic elegy—an elegy defined most strikingly by her devotion to unsentimental self-interrogation and her equally unflinching assessments of public life."

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