Martin Jack

 

British Weather

 

In between thunder

we frown the sound of rain

 

99 layers

of suicide weather

 

in the brick museum

we solder

 

on as static

wilting customers of empire

 

and fog

sticking like a broken record

 

to the climate

of English romantics

 

that bores the American prairie

into changing

 

lanes beyond castle ruins

of Shakespeare critics

 

melting in the Jerusalem

where chariots fall asleep.

 

 

Shedding Skunks

 

Soon we’ll wax about the I

as nothing but abstract pain

like Lowell’s skunk of the damned

shedding the love affair

with a winter coat.

 

Where egos build victim

art out of biography,

I can’t help but want exits

out of the tunnel vision confessing

creates as an obsession in the mirror.

Where the reflecting inward, hooked

on mania, straps poetry

to the rack.

 

Exits beyond the skunk

require a language of others,

objects that skin peel off biography

until the first word spoken

opens pores like a parachute

landing softly on fire-rinsed fields,

where we plant telescopes, full

of galaxies, alternatives to self

that will not scare.

 

 

 

t p u

Martin Jack