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Jay Leeming is the author of Dynamite on a China Plate, a book of poems published by The Backwaters Press. His poems have appeared in a variety of magazines including Ploughshares, The Gettysburg Review, Poetry East and Black Warrior Review. He has been a featured reader at Butler University, the Omega Institute, Robert Bly’s Great Mother Conference and the Woodstock Poetry Festival, and is the recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives and teaches in Ithaca, New York.
poems:
Red Autumn Bells
While holding her in my arms I start to think forward
and back, to number each chocolate, to throw rope
around laughter and her eyes.
But wondering how long it will last
is the best way to lose something
that’s all yours. So I clamber back up
into the kiss, into this blue room
where we murmur together,
the two of us
becoming one river. Ankles, elbows,
eyes and thighs: we make one river.
— copyright ©2007 Jay Leeming, all rights reserved
— 508 1/2 Utica Street Ithaca, NY 14850
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See also his website at
http://www.jayleeming.com
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Conversation With the Nobody
One day I was busy writing a poem
when this horse walked into my room.
But a horse did not walk into your room.
Okay one day I was writing a poem
when a lion stepped out of the wall.
But a lion did not step out of the wall.
No listen the other day I was feeding my giraffe
when this poem came up to me.
But there is no poem.
Look how can I write anything if you always
erase it, I said.
Okay.
There is a horse.
There is a lion.
There is a giraffe.
But there is still no poem.
— copyright ©2007 Jay Leeming, all rights reserved
Mosaic
With your beautiful hands you showed me
how to smash a tile with a hammer
to break shards enough
to make a picture whole. Now
if I could just get this clay square to split
in a gentle curve
I could finish this pattern I’ve started
of a green guitar. It’s a puzzle half made
and half destroyed, an accident I let happen
as the hammer cracks on the tile
like the first day of school, like that shattering cut
the knife made
through the umbilical cord.
Months after our first kiss,
each of us slowly learns where the other
has been broken. Together
our lives make a pattern
neither of us could have planned.
—copyright ©2007 Jay Leeming, all rights reserved
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Walking Coy Hill Road
1.
Two weeks until solstice, and there’s so much light
every day feels like three days. I spent the first one eating oatmeal,
the second washing down a pile of old boards for $10 an hour.
On the third day I took a bath in accordance with the scriptures
that my body learned while floating in the womb.
Perhaps because life is short
we should live each moment at full volume
with the pedal jammed against the floor.
At sunset I sat down by the pond to eat my brown rice,
and a gun went off in the trees.
2.
I have spent time in the alternate universes
where you and I live happily ever after.
Like the one in which I am just a little older
and so marry you after all, or the one
in which we both live in the same town
and so get to know each other more gently.
But it’s no use. For us to be together now
so much would have to be different
that we would be total strangers to ourselves.
Sometimes I catch sight of us
sitting at a table in the bakery, each of us held
by the other, though we are not touching.
3.
This morning on the news the Attorney General said
that citizens’ rights must be violated further
or else “our ability to catch terrorists will be more difficult.”
These days eloquence in the capitol is shot on sight.
Jefferson’s thousand-volume library
can only show us how far we’ve fallen,
a circle of light we see above us in the dark
before the well-opening is covered with a stone.
4.
Sometimes the moon writes your shadow
on the road ahead of you like it’s trying to tell you something.
My ancestors probably knew that language,
but I could only understand it if I slept for twenty years
at a ninety-degree angle to the nightly news.
So I walk in boots of ignorance
hoping I’ll hear the message again in a dream,
or that any damage I may cause
will be healed by the next ice age.
5.
These words arrived suddenly, like large glasses of water
handed to me as I walked down Coy Hill Road at dusk.
I nearly dropped them before I made it into the house.
In fact it’s possible I left most of the gift out there in the dark
to be swallowed by coyotes, or woven as raindrops
into the phoebe’s mossy nest.
If anything’s missing I’m not sure I could tell.
When you’ve lived indoors as long as we have
entire continents can vanish beneath the sea
before you notice anything’s gone.
— copyright ©2007 Jay Leeming, all rights reserved
— 508 1/2 Utica Street Ithaca, NY 14850
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Jay Leeming, poet,