For a limited time only, save 30% on your OA subscription in honor of our 30th anniversary. Subscriptions start as low as $1.39 per month.

Photos by Kristine Potter © The artist. Courtesy Sasha Wolf Projects.

Nashville Sonnet Deconstructed on a Bed of Magnolia Blossoms BY MAJOR JACKSON

             In this city no one talks dialectical materialism From high up the cranes speak an invincible language. The trusses extend over pedal taverns and tractors, joyriding flatbeds of dancing tourists, and it is like reading God’s lips. En garde! she says.

             Today I am landscaping, staking light across my wintergreen yard to get the worm’s perspective, to beg his forgiveness.

             I am reaching fingers into darkest soil pondering the afterlife. A house wren flouts its surefire code to all this achy breaky singing

             —such intricate phrasing like a compass behind Giacomo da Lentini’s feathered quill pen. Who doesn’t want to live in a city of acoustic martyrs addicted to heartbreak?

Plus this: even the magnolias, vulnerable each spring, court a delicious despair, and still burst their creamy fat blossoms like spark plugs for the living.

Photos by Kristine Potter © The artist. Courtesy Sasha Wolf Projects.

It depends on the time of day & how light flames the ash tree which stands like a bell tower in our yard, its backdrop the Harpeth Hills rolling like muddy waves in the distance, & instead of leaves, this tree drops curled penny-colored prayers which I sweep each day into the compost bin, sure they are meant for someone else, where they echo, rattle their song. Fall is so close—I’ve begun to consider the heat a weapon. Summer seems to want to dig a cool spot under some shade, pant herself into a new season, only to find she’s pregnant, her pups like hot stars burning for years & years to come. How do I tell the tree to stop praying? That the war might be over? That we may have lost? The softest parts of any body are cut out so easily— think the eyes of the saints, their tongues, their hearts. We do nothing with these parts but throw them onto the fire. We like to see them burn; we must like the flames.

This is what the heart knows: a ramekin of warm peach cobbler crowned with a splodge of vanilla whose slow melt is the altering of the seasons, the coming of autumn swirling in a mass of milky orange sugar; Bach’s Sonata No. 1 in B Minor, its opening movement, a sojourn reminiscent of December rain or my grandfather, graveside, alone, his frightened stare into a dirt hole recalling his errors; the heart knows the spine as the exquisite corridor to the senses, noodle-like strands registering the tingling of beach pebbles underfoot, or a courageous plunge into an iron cold sea or the way you feel when she pulls her favorite lichen green dress over her head, rivering her body, a fabric waterfall across the heart which also knows Orpheus’s frantic reach, Bernini’s sculpture, Pluto’s ghost white fingers clutching Proserpina’s thigh in the Borghese, or Venus’s shattering tennis swing, her victorious scream, but the heart does not know primordial dangers, wildfires scattering a devil’s dream, hurricane winds drowning castles to make a sudden skeleton of us all, which is why we devour and swallow earth like vultures on a highway, standing around, waiting our turn.

Photos by Kristine Potter © The artist. Courtesy Sasha Wolf Projects.

Hidden Lake BY DIDI JACKSON

On steady legs and with a low constant growl, the storm comes close this afternoon.

We are at the lake and want to swim, to escape the heat, the biting flies, to feel our bodies petal on the glass of water, to feel our bodies glide

across the wet tongue of the hills, to feel ourselves glimmer like ghosts.

The woods hum electric as the last summer days up the volume—

all metallic and flourish. The ridgeline slips from deep

green to gold, mauve milkweed crowning acre after acre. This is when

I don’t recognize my life. My own father never learned to swim, the least of his worries, though I’ve known I need a heavy coat in autumn and to be submerged summer after summer. How I wish he could have trusted the fresh water around him, its buoyancy and breath. Those of you with fathers like physicists could never know

how many times he was held under. Thunder beyond the hills warns us not to give in to the cool sooty blue of the water but to feel our frames

as something other than our own burden just for a moment weightless and held up.

Radnor Lake BY DIDI JACKSON

two days after the Christmas Day bombing in Nashville, TN for Kate Daniels

Plastic bags tangle like three netted robins high at the peak of the day topping the silver maple; they fill and flatten with the breeze billowing vox humana across the lake that Kate and I edge slowly— circumambulating the reeds and sterling-still sky. Two days ago, on Christmas morning, the city in which I live exploded. A man wanted to be heard so he shook the steely windows & iron rebar of the tall buildings, sleepers shuddered awake; it was a frantic sunrise. A bombed day in which only he died. How it could have been so different. In the South robins stay all winter, flit among the empty branches like restless fingers, shuttle from tree to tree caroling before dawn or as evening sets. We are at the lake early this day, the soil wet and smelling of char. The shaking bodies of the bags above us like small shrines to no one.

Photos by Kristine Potter © The artist. Courtesy Sasha Wolf Projects.

We’re at Cheekwood, entering a low-lit tunnel, like switching subway trains at Canal Street, only one arrives here like a pilgrim in Turrell’s Blue Pesher whose circular chamber is retreat and terminus of blue sky, whose pit of black sand puts one in mind of Wooly Willy’s iron filings and magnetic wand, a bald-faced man transformed suddenly, all whiskers and mustache. I’m letting this white cylindrical room and oculus with the knee-high stone seat be my therapy recalling my father’s cruel barbs. We never discussed, as a child in Fairmount Park, sitting at one end of the Whispering Bench, my nine o’clock to his three, he said, I wish you were born a girl. Years those words clung to ventricle walls and wended their way to my parabolic heart. A father myself, I forgave. Now I see the shallow disc of dark gravel as pyre to imagine burning one’s shelf of slights, which I do, then gaze up at a piercing blue sky.

I Have Seen a Sky BY DIDI JACKSON I have seen a sky darken like a choir box, a kingfisher’s wings glisten blue like stained glass,

a fire’s flames purple themselves like ripening fruit,

the hammer peck at the nail, a dove gray lake stone become oracle when polished in a pocket with fear. I’ve seen whistling workers step into the blue, moving scaffold to scaffold like pigeons. From rooms of regret I have found dozens of white receipts discarded like dried snake skins. I’ve tasted the call of the house wren in my black tea at daybreak, let steep the shaft of golden light piercing the kitchen window, and have added honey to sweeten the garbage collector’s humming as he spins giant plastic bins like dance partners. I have seen the tarnished bronze leaves of the alley join the clumsy waltz until everything is the larghetto of my breath.

Sturnus vulgaris BY DIDI JACKSON

The stones on the path behind our home mimic the chords of the highway, and the fabric of the honeysuckle fills the edges enough to muffle the grit of the alley where days ago we walked past the dead body of a starling, stiff as a small bundle of branches, eyes eaten and cored, feet frozen gripping the clouds— everyone hates the starlings and I’m always surprised at how people abhor that which assimilates the best. Plumage of the starry night sky, beak of yellow whirs & rattles, flight of a four-pointed star. So many want them dead. They thrive. The male decorates nests with flowers to attract his mate. They are myna birds known to imitate a ringing phone, killdeer, a red-tailed hawk, car alarms, the name Mortimer: Nay, I’ll have a starling shall be taught to speak Nothing but ‘Mortimer,’ and give it him, To keep his anger still in motion. Feathered bullets, dense chunks of winged bark, shapeshifters, breathing giants in the early evening sky.

Ten Album Covers BY MAJOR JACKSON

1. The future is a blind piano man

of ancient beats from the Roman Empire

2. This summer, I did my best to forget

of the skies, yet remained a prisoner

3. When I can’t sleep,

I count all my likes.

4. This morning I read Zagajewski

who recently vanished into a quantum

of light. I’m sure I treasure most his clarity

which like my belief in art seems endless.

5. On the kitchen counter, right now:

three sunflowers in a clear vase stretching

the day into a single filament of wonder.

6. No one knows why sometimes

when reading a book, the face contorts

into a golden wildfire at night,

7. What I am talking about is my funeral

where all the pallbearers are Yoruba priestesses passing

my body once again through a field of summer.

8. Our great tragedy is abandoning our accents,

surely, our first instruments. Then our great triumph

is returning home years later to retrieve them.

9. Tack me up on your wall.

I want you to feel this energy,

to which you say, “Piddly.”

10. A fox is a suffering creature

of a piano player, exploding

drowning Zeus’s silence.

So many want them dead.

Photos by Kristine Potter © The artist. Courtesy Sasha Wolf Projects

January 7, 2021 BY MAJOR JACKSON How strange, absurd even, I started to random hum Ray Charles’s “America the Beautiful” on Route 71 en route to Nashville, unbidden, over some byway, his voice (my voice?) ribboning undulant farmhouses and homespun meadows as lush as the road’s rows of crops dopplering their harvest and its invisible circuitry of rhizomatic speech, resolute like church spires transmitting fervent prayers through gray slabs of clouds, my solitary low singing beside a stream of big rigs and tankers, all part of this long strife, this exhilarating tableau of a nation’s story of becoming. I felt anchored behind a steering wheel driving past half-beaten malls and political billboards whose sadness echoed like neon crosses fading behind eyelids. My freedom was the revery of his rendition and the ghettoes from whence I journeyed, and like any good road story, I hooked into the blue scream of spacious skies. We all look for miracles until what follows equal our country loved and mercy more than life.

A Lady More Brilliant than The Sun BY DIDI JACKSON Two days until June and the hydrangea are already wilting only to be full, almost resurrected in the morning. The Blue Ridge Mountains are over five hours away by car on roads as crooked as my memory or as the cursive many of the young can no longer read with which I signed a certificate of death and two years later signed one for marriage. Those mountains hunker like a row of giant church bells—ring and ring a reminder

of my late husband’s last days. Like his mind just before he took his life, their song unravels across the state

until it lands here in Nashville where two purple finches make their nest in my front porch ferns, their fledglings taking up all that singing.

Hatching within thirteen days, they scatter like heart break or is it devotion? The closer the anniversary of his death, the louder the toll. He died on the 13th, my father born on the 13th, I remarried in 2013. In 1917 three shepherd children in Portugal were visited by the Virgin Mary on the 13th of each month

for six months. It was a miracle to end the Great War. We all look for miracles. The delicate movement of the black elm becomes a manifestation of mercy. On the last day of The Lady’s visitation to the children,

they said the sun rolled and danced in the sky. To what song did it sway? I know I’ve heard it. Haven’t you?

Didi Jackson is the author of Moon Jar (Red Hen Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, the Kenyon Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere, and have been selected for the Best American Poetry series and Poem-a-Day by the Academy of American Poets. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee, and serves as a visiting assistant professor of creative writing at Vanderbilt University.

Major Jackson is the author of five volumes of poetry, most recently The Absurd Man (Norton, 2020). A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, he lives in Nashville, where he is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. He serves as the poetry editor of the Harvard Review.

© Oxford American 2022. All Rights Reserved