Jessica Greenbaum Poems

I was listening to a book on tape while driving
and when the author said, "Those days I delighted in everything,"
I pulled over and found a pencil and a parking ticket stub
because surely there was a passage of life where I thought
"These days I delight in everything," right there in the
present, because they almost all feel like that now,
memory having markered only the outline while evaporating
the inner anxieties of earlier times. Did I not disparage
my body for years on end, for instance, although, in contrast
that younger one now strikes me as near-Olympian?
And the crushing preoccupations of that same younger self
might seem magically diluted, as though a dictator
in hindsight, had only been an overboard character — 
but not so. Where went the fear, dense as the sudden
dark in the woods, of being alone, or the bruise of 3:30 pm
in a silent apartment, when the disenfranchised live
only with the sunlight through the blinds, just prey
caught betwixt and between, and also heartbreak, and
again, heartbreak. I didn't have whatever that time of life
then demanded — a book, a wedding band, a baby — 
but the present, like the lie of "fair and balanced" news reporting
where creationists are granted air time with the scientists,
the present might have me believe that "in those days
I delighted in everything." But to be ... fair and balanced ...
I do trust the strict part of memory, the only archivist
to have savored a passage of time and have preserved it
with the translucent green hinges licked by stamp collectors,
attaching it without hurting it, so I wanted the quote
exactly, and go back to hunt and tag those months where I
delighted in everything — then I couldn't find the ticket stub.
I rummaged through the recycling but no luck, and I
couldn't go back to find the passage on tape, and then I realized
I had bought the book for my husband, so I started leafing through it,
not wanting to start too far back, and not wanting
my eyes to fall on a passage in the future, the one where
she realizes that "Those days I delighted in everything,"
but it was never to happen again, just the present, from here on in.
...

I only have a moment so let me tell you the shortest story,
about arriving at a long loved place, the house of friends in Maine,
their lawn of wildflowers, their grandfather clock and candid
portraits, their gabled attic rooms, and woodstove in the kitchen,
all accessories of the genuine summer years before, when I was
their son's girlfriend and tied an apron behind my neck, beneath
my braids, and took from their garden the harvest for a dinner
I would make alone and serve at their big table with the gladness
of the found, and loved. The eggplant shone like polished wood,
the tomatoes smelled like their furred collars, the dozen zucchini
lined up on the counter like placid troops with the onions, their
minions, and I even remember the garlic, each clove from its airmail
envelope brought to the cutting board, ready for my instruction.
And in this very slight story, a decade later, I came by myself,
having been dropped by the airport cab, and waited for the family
to arrive home from work. I walked into the lawn, waist-high
in the swaying, purple lupines, the subject of   June's afternoon light
as I had never been addressed — a displaced young woman with
cropped hair, no place to which I wished to return, and no one
to gather me in his arms. That day the lupines received me,
and I was in love with them, because they were all I had left,
and in that same manner I have loved much of the world since then,
and who is to say there is more of a reason, or more to love?
...

Of course there is a jackhammer. And a view, like Hopper,
but happier. Of course there is the newspaper—the daily
herald of our powerlessness. Easy go, easy come: thwash,
the next day another, an example of everything that gets done
in the dark. Like the initiative of the crocuses from a snow
that was, as it works out, warming them. Or in this case,
the strange October weather warming them. There were the
conclusions we jumped to. To which we jumped. There was
pain, and then there was suffering. Of course there was my
ambition to offer you the world, but one that I have rearranged
to make sense. Here are all the sensations of being alive
at the turn of the twenty-first century, here's how they ring out
against each other, here's how one brings out the sense of
another, here is the yellow next to the fathomless blue.
...

As you told it to me — our clearest, most reflective conversations
so often then and there, in the middle of the night, staring into
the darkness from wherever the mind has perched in its wanderings — 
you left your mother and the home aide upstairs, and went down
into your father's basement workroom to look for the right
size screws; in her own wanderings, she has tugged off the front
door lock. Paneled in warped wood and abandoned like a mine,
you find the string for the light in the middle of the room, as he
must have known how to find it in the dark, and again you see
the pegboard walls covered with constellations of polishing tools,
the larger buffers hooked onto the paneling like fuzzy planets,
the smaller ones stuck in a Lucite block he customized to hold them
like the varied moons those hanging planets might need, or a
miniature copse of fantastical trees. So, too, the see-through brick
in which he drilled holes for the array of drill bits themselves,
their swirled metal tops imitating a skyline of onion domes and
tapered gothic towers. The room's order had been disturbed
by time, and the band saw, jigsaw, the sander, and free-standing
machines, the sized wrenches, pliers, picks, awls, and extra parts
still hanging in their packages, the staple gun, lamps, brushes,
gooseneck magnifying glass, soldering wire, conversion charts,
the hundreds of other disordered tools, they might have been words
in an encyclopedia before you could read more than a few words,
and for you they were part of your father's speech, or maybe
more like your mother's now, jumbled, rarely creating a sentence.
With these tools he had sculpted a perfect cluster of grapes,
still on their vine and still with their leaves; a wave, and a school
of dolphins breaching; a formal replica of the Brooklyn Bridge
with all its cabling; a bouquet of flowers — surfaces so smooth
and rounded, objects so like their living counterparts we had no
choice but to understand the power of creation running through
the mind then tools and hands like a current. You looked around
for the right size screws and came upon a small box marked
Green Permanent. And when you opened it you saw small tubes
of paint, now just mud without his attention, you said, holding both
the power of what we do, and the sadness that it has to end.
...

before iced coffee came to town, a sump from which I've fished
many a memory of regret and loneliness and whose misery
I now understand came less from my pocked nature than from
the chokehold of blue laws, and from my broken-willed Eeyore
of a used car which liked to stop stubbornly in Sealy, halfway to
Hill Country, and always one day after the insurance ran out,
and from the paucity of public space so that we drove (locally)
from shopping strip to balding park, once to a leech-infested pond;
and owing also to the blinding afternoons that made invisible,
to the unpracticed eye, micro-lands of existing urban hip, or just a bench
on which to read the paper, the scarce sense from city planners
that those residents without garden-crusted homes held their own set
of municipal needs which might take the form of some kind of . . .
beauty; together with the impossibility of finding deep
shade or hearing wind flash through trees, the abundance of short
rain storms or hurricanes, both of which, equally, caused water to boil
out of the sewers and flood the car (which wouldn't, then, even be
starting out to break down in Sealy without borrowing again
to fix it): and the living rooms' glass sliders opening without apology
onto the apartments' walkway and courtyard, motel-style,
furthering the shallow sense of experience; and all this witnessed
by two small universities whose meek students made no protest
that their third-largest city in the United States—a town sporting more
soft-food cafeterias than all the chipped-beef eaters in the world
could possibly attend at once—offered but two art cinemas
and nearly nowhere to wander or peruse, nowhere to make peace
with the simple fact of your twenties; and on such a day as this,
the one I walked through this morning in late June, on such a day
we would have gathered those friends we could draw from their corners,
their condos, their garage apartments humming to beat the cicadas,
and we would meet in one driveway with a particular lock-and-key
of desperation-and-relief I have been lucky enough not to feel since,
a collective village slamming the doors on our town, plugging in
a tape as we took off for Galveston because if it was going to be endlessly
flat it might as well be on a beach regardless of the soupy knee-high water
or the thwapping mullets jumping out of it, and we might as well be
together on a blanket in the middle of the desert drinking something
cool enough to slake one of all our many raging, hissing thirsts.
...

I had just hung up from talking to you
and we had been so immersed in the difficulty
you were facing, and forgive me,
I was thinking that as long as we kept talking,
you in your car in the parking lot of the boys' school
as the afternoon deepened into early evening,
and me in the study, all the books around
that had been sources of beauty to us,
as long as we stayed in the conversation
padded with history like the floor of the pine forest,
as long as I thought out loud, made a joke
at my own expense, you would be harbored in that exchange,
but the boys were leaving the track
and after we hung up I looked out the window
to see the top of the bare January trees spotlit to silvery red,
massive but made from the thinnest
twigs at the ends of the branches at the ends of the limbs
they were waving and shining in a light
like no other and left only to them.
...

The day turned into the city
and the city turned into the mind
and the moving trucks trumbled along
like loud worries speaking over
the bicycle's idea
which wove between
the more armored vehicles of expression
and over planks left by the construction workers
on a holiday morning when no work was being done
because no matter the day, we tend towards
remaking parts of it—what we said
or did, or how we looked—
and the buildings were like faces
lining the banks of a parade
obstructing and highlighting each other
defining height and width for each other
offsetting grace and function
like Audrey Hepburn from
Jesse Owens, and the hearty pigeons collaborate
with wrought iron fences
and become recurring choruses of memory
reassembling around benches
we sat in once, while seagulls wheel
like immigrating thoughts, and never-leaving
chickadees hop bared hedges and low trees
like commas and semicolons, landing
where needed, separating
subjects from adjectives, stringing along
the long ideas, showing how the cage
has no door, and the lights changed
so the tide of sound ebbed and returned
like our own breath
and when I knew everything
was going to look the same as the mind
I stopped at a lively corner
where the signs themselves were like
perpendicular dialects in conversation and
I put both my feet on the ground
took the bag from the basket
so pleased it had not been crushed
by the mightiness of all else
that goes on and gave you the sentence inside.
...

Of  that string of memories about our lost friendship I remember
being invited places as a pair, like a comedy team; and after
one party, our self-parody of our own stammering
speechlessness when introduced to Henrik, the Swedish god
auto mechanic; our twin, garish, purple-flowered swimsuits
from Kmart, outlining, around Texas, our sameness
and differences; our dual waitressing shifts across town,
and the long phone calls that followed with their emphatic
reiteration of every stingy six-top ordering candy-flavored
alcoholic drinks; the after-work visit where we brayed,
stomped, then blinked stupidly (while the needle hit
the LP's end) at the empty fifth of gin left on the coffee table,
prompting a dim: Uh oh; your imitation of your mother's
habitual and by-the-way inexplicable confession about you
to shoe salesmen: She has a  funny foot; the apartments,
the Olivettis, the boyfriends, all the thoughts exchanged
unedited like an experiment of the big, walk-in consciousness,
which we might have assumed the verbal equivalent
of sex for friends, and whatever closeness meant, we wanted
as much as we could have, it was our post-graduate work
in The Humanities. Even now, I can't resist striking up
a conversation while standing on line, any line, or introducing
myself enthusiastically to whomever I am introduced,
but the truth is I am not looking for new friends at this point;
I am trying to locate the lost ones, the ones who left
through the hole of an argument decades ago,
a time more panicked and carefree than any other, except maybe
the early years of motherhood, which I missed sharing
with you on playground benches. But surely I will see you
on the bus someday, and your greeting will package
our jokes, advice, tears, book talk, our years of reliance.
And so I will expect you will tell me how much I have
misunderstood and wrongly assumed in these descriptions,
because I never expect those people who have mattered
to remain completely gone, even through death, or rebuke.
And of course I have to remember what parted us,
that I found faults with your other friends, that I spoke
as critically and crassly about them as I did about my own person,
and to this day I have to be careful of that trait, my junkyard
dog of expression, safe only with me on a too-long leash. Here,
again, telling you everything with no reason but for
memory's insistence that I string an apology from what I see.
...

Because you used to leaf through the dictionary,
Casually, as someone might in a barber shop, and
Devotedly, as someone might in a sanctuary,
Each letter would still have your attention if not
For the responsibilities life has tightly fit, like
Gears around the cog of you, like so many petals
Hinged on a daisy. That's why I'll just use your
Initial. Do you know that in one treasured story, a
Jewish ancestor, horseback in the woods at Yom
Kippur, and stranded without a prayer book,
Looked into the darkness and realized he had
Merely to name the alphabet to ask forgiveness—
No congregation of figures needed, he could speak
One letter at a time because all of creation
Proceeded from those. He fed his horse, and then
Quietly, because it was from his heart, he
Recited them slowly, from aleph to tav. Within those
Sounds, all others were born, all manner of
Trials, actions, emotions, everything needed to
Understand who he was, had been, how flaws
Venerate the human being, how aspirations return
Without spite. Now for you, may your wife's
X-ray return with good news, may we raise our
Zarfs to both your names in the Great Book of Life.
...

So you see why it could not have been a more humble moment.
If there was any outward sign of regalia
It might have been the twilight crowning of the day, just then,
A perfect moment of dusk, but changing, as a wave does
Even as you admire it. Because the southbound stop
Mirrors the one northbound where we so often find ourselves
At the beginning, southbound's return holds the memory
Of northbound's setting-out, and the grassy median between
With its undisturbed trees defines an elusive strip of the present
Where no one lives. After twenty-eight years of the trip,
It's like two beakers of colored water — one green, one blue — 
Have poured themselves back and forth, because
On one side we are tinted by remembering the other.
But this aspect of the journey, at least, we know we will repeat.
As dusk cohered that moment — aquas, pinks, violets — 
Just at that moment as I was returning to the car
A woman came the other way, her two young daughters
Holding her hands, and the gloaming sparkled around them
So that I froze, as they were backlit, starry,
They were the southbound reminder of who I had been beginning
The trip. She didn't look like me, but what I did recognize
Was her clarity of purpose, in what Sharon Olds called
the days of great usefulness, making life as nice
As she could for them, always writing the best story,
And also, beneath her skin, living with delight as quiet
As the shoots anchoring grass beneath the earth.
I walked back to my car. My husband sat in the driver's seat,
Our weekend's luggage thrown in back.
Tell me we really had those girls, I said,
and that they held my hands like that. When I got home
I pictured her helping them each into bed — I knew it was
Later than she had hoped — then reading
Each section of the paper's terrible news, finally alone.
...