Poetry |

“Fire Ants” & “An Exultation of Spirit”

Fire Ants

 

 

A rattlesnake is a hallucination — chartreuse on black —

departs its shed skin under the exhausted

 

Jonathan apple while you twist

in sleep. Up-mountain

 

seven acres blaze into seven hundred,

then seven thousand. Your slender fingers

 

curl into palms, wrists bend toward sky —

you make your pillows wet.

 

Your thighs are burning. How many legs

on how many spiders

 

are crisped to an absent stench?

Forget about escape. Forget about

 

not being able to see what you descry.

At an outdoor market

 

a pile of deep fried ants fills a turquoise bowl.

Toothpicks stacked for sampling.

 

The art of death

is not an art of adaptation,

 

it is an art of reinvention.

A smoke forest becomes the cloud forest

 

where you once watched the tops of mountains

turn into goddesses clothed in satin,

 

watched them leap until they were naked,

their golden bangles slipping one by one

 

out of the ether,

ringing the rocky peaks.

 

 

*     *     *     *     *

 

 

An Exultation of Spirit

 

I wish I could say that a surgeon’s knife

in the small of my back and the successful removal

of some extra bone, the liberation of a cornered nerve,

would be enough to jump start me back into the joy of living,

and that this morning — as I watched a massive raven,

much larger than I would have thought,

land on the rim of the birdbath and drop a mouse carcass in,

hop away, pick it back up with its beak, drop it in again,

shake it around in the water, gulp a few sips, then fly off

with the baptized meal — I wish I could say that it was enough,

to have observed this clever raven — to see that its practice

was wise, and after, when I went out to make fresh again

the water for the other birds and found the entrails, the stomach,

a bloated liver, floating in the shallow water, I wish I could say

that I felt grateful for my life — to be present in the raw early morning,

in this orchard of aspens and wild plums — the damp pines

bending their boughs toward my house, but what I received

was not an exultation of spirit, but rather a yank in the flesh,

much like a set of fresh stitches being ripped out — blessed is not

what you receive in this life, blessed is how you renounce it.

Contributor
Elizabeth Jacobson

Elizabeth Jacobson was the fifth Poet Laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico and an Academy of American Poets 2020 Laureate Fellow.  Her most recent book, Not into the Blossoms and Not into the Air, was awarded the New Measure Poetry Prize, selected by Marianne Boruch (Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press, 2019), and the 2019 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award for both New Mexico Poetry and Best New Mexico Book. Her other books include Her Knees Pulled In (Tres Chicas Books, 2012), two chapbooks from Dancing Girl Press, Are the Children Make Believe? (2017) and A Brown Stone (2015), and Everything Feels Recent When You’re Far AwayPoetry and Art from Santa Fe Youth During the Pandemic (2021), which she co-edited. Her work has been supported by grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry, New Mexico Arts, and the Academy of American Poets. Elizabeth is the Reviews Editor for the on-line literary journal Terrain.org. Visit her Link Tree account at: https://linktr.ee/ElizabethJacobson

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